Midnights

Taylor Swift’s new album Midnights is a testament to the mind of one of the generation’s biggest

stars. She takes us along through her sleepless nights, re-examining the last half of her life 16 years into her career. This album announced only 2 months before its release, with a promotional stunt of revealing song titles one by one running in between. She released no clips or singles, so when it dropped, no one knew what to expect. What we got felt like both musically and lyrically a culmination of the last 9 years of her pop journey: an self-reflective album of deep synth-pop in which she meticulously agonizes over moments from her past while learning how to move on.

The album opens with an alluring “meet me at midnight.” The first track, “Lavender Haze,” spends 20 seconds building to the start of the verse, interspersing processed ad-libs that feel like Swift is dancing in and out of a purple fog around you. Although lyrically nothing special, it’s an excellent opener, establishing the sound of the album at the very beginning. She sing

s of finding true love in spite of the public’s constant watch over her, which sets a good example of what much of the album will discuss: the complex relationships between fame, love, and self.

Most of the songs deal with reflecting on the past one way or another. On hit song “Anti-Hero,” she examines her life and starts to accept that maybe what everyone says about her is true–maybe she’s the problem. In the profoundly personal “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” (a famous Taylor Swift track 5), she crafts a memoir through her experiences and shares the most important lesson she’s learned: to appreciate what happens to you, because in the end, you’re always going to be alone. In contrast to that, “Sweet Nothing” details the peace of finally having a lover you can come home to. “Karma,” an upbeat track about letting the universe get your vengeance, presents a hopeful conclusion to the long string of songs about what happened at the 2009 VMAs (in spite of there being one only 4 songs earlier). “Midnight Rain” is a classic Swift song about a lover who wants something different from you, but this time she tells the story in a more personal way–it’s hard when you find someone who wants a stable relationship with you when you’re caught up in the makings of new fame.

For all the self-awareness found in Anti-Hero, she still seems to be obsessing over the petty feud she’s entertained with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian for decades now. This shows up most blatantly in “Vigilante Shit,” a deep, bass-y track that sounds like it came straight off of 2017’s reputation (fitting, given how much of that album was also about Kanye). It’s the low point of the album–as she spins tales of her “vigilante” attempts to get back at him, I found myself becoming detached from the relatable first-person persona that connects me to Swift for most of the album and instead suddenly shaking my head as if a fly on the wall on the 5th hour of watching the occupants of the house scream at each other.

The sound of the album is nothing new for Swift, yet still feels like a more mature take. It combines the production on 1989 and reputation to create a more dark synth-pop sound, fitting for the title. All 3 albums are, of course, produced by pop’s current darling Jack Antonoff, who’s been working with Swift since 2013. I’d like to take this time to call attention to one of Antonoff’s other works that seems at play here: Lorde’s 2017 Melodrama. Upon hearing the album, my first thoughts were that Antonoff seems to be repeating his tricks. This may be most clearly heard on “Maroon”, a dark, booming track about love found in the small moments of life in an apartment in New York City. While the lyrics feel distinctly Swift, the song could easily slot in with others on Lorde’s album such as “Green Light,” “Homemade Dynamite,” and “Hard Feelings.”

Lyrically, Midnights differs greatly from those past 2 albums. On 1989, Swift took on the role of a crazy serial-lover singing about making men fall for her when she knows she’ll leave them in the end. On reputation, she is a scorned queen, a woman determined to prove that in spite of what everyone says about her she will always come out on top. The goal of both albums was to successfully embody the person everyone thought she was, a marketing technique that worked to show everyone that she wasn’t that woman, but you didn’t know who she actually was behind it, either. Midnights stands in direct opposition. On this concept album about what keeps Taylor Swift up at night, she gets personal. She still sometimes sings about doomed relationships and the drama surrounding her reputation, but this time it feels like it’s coming from a place of genuine emotion, as opposed to a fictionalized persona. Whether it’s the joy of a lover who finally understands or reminiscing on a past mistake or trying to sort out whether she’s the hero or the villan, every song feels like something that keeps her up at night.

For me, one of the highlights is “Labyrinth,” a B-side track about the transition from the freshly cut wound of a breakup to falling in love with someone new. It’s the rare kind of song that tells a story in the present tense instead of a retrospective, opening with the lines, “It only hurts this much right now/Caught in the labyrinth of my mind.” In the first verse, she is mid-panic, vowing to be getting over her lover for her whole life. In the second, she accepts the breakup and starts to mention someone new, though bitter that “Everybody just expects me to bounce back.” In lieu of a bridge, the chorus is repeated 4 more times. But throughout that, the music shifts to convey a new meaning: from a quiet, stripped down version where Swift sings tentatively to a processed one where she sings increasingly layered vocals over top as the music swells hopefully behind her. The story is represented even within the lyrics of the chorus: “Uh-oh, I’m falling in love/Oh no, I’m falling in love again/Oh, I’m falling in love.”

The final song, “Mastermind,” conveys a different kind of story. She tells of meeting a new lover and making him fall for her, eventually peaking in a desperate bridge where she explains that ever since childhood, she has mastered the ability of manipulating other people’s perception of her. In the final chorus, she changes the lines to reveal he’s known what she’s been doing the entire time. It’s representative of her story as a whole: she has spent so much of her life crafting the ideal Taylor Swift, building up a persona she thought was impenetrable, only to eventually learn, with a smirk on our faces, we’ve known the whole time it wasn’t the real her. After this reckoning, her last 2 albums have been spent writing about other people. This one is the not-quite-triumphant return to her own life–but this time from an older, far more mature perspective. She’s still a mastermind of her own design, but this time, we’re all in on it. And she’s taking us along for the introspective ride.