Throughout her entire career, Taylor Swift just proved that she’s the best there is. Her songs and albums, which is a collection of hazy and unambiguously autobiographical love songs, is getting on to our nerves and all body parts LITERALLY.
‘Midnights’ is Swift’s return to the pop pipeline after her digressions of the past couple of years. Many of the lyrics, as she suggested, resemble late-night ruminations, pondering life’s pressures, aging, and the meaning of love.
Her new album, as Taylor Swift explained in a statement when her tenth studio album was revealed, “The stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life”. A collection of songs “written in the middle of the night”.
The announcement of this album came as something of a surprise. Currently in the midst of re-recording her first six albums in order to take back the ownership of her earlier projects – we’ve already had ‘Taylor’s Version’ of both ‘Fearless’ and ‘Red’, another original album felt distant, particularly after the release of sister albums ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’ amidst the pandemic.
FUN FACTS:
- According to the album’s credits, most of the songs were written and recorded with her longtime collaborator, Jack Antonoff.
- “Sweet Nothing,” was written by Swift with one William Bowery — an unfamiliar name that popped up in the credits to “Folklore,” which Swift later acknowledged was a pseudonym for the actor Joe Alwyn, her boyfriend. “They said the end is coming/Everyone’s up to something,” she sings on the track. “I find myself running home to your sweet nothings.”
- Some intriguing names also pop up in the credits. The actress Zoë Kravitz listed as one of the six songwriters of the first track, “Lavender Haze,” alongside Swift, Antonoff, Mark Anthony Spears (a.k.a. the producer Sounwave), Jahaan Sweet and Sam Dew. Swift’s friendship with Kravitz is close enough that she once acted as an uncredited assistant on a pandemic-era remote photo shoot of Kravitz for The New York Times Magazine.
CONCLUSION
It’s a striking balance—Taylor Swift’s commerciality with pop experimentation. While ‘Midnights’ is here giving us all the feels LATE AT NIGHT, we can never deny the fact that this album turned out to have such a beautifully art-directed rollout. Taylor Swift remains QUEEN, in the most uneven things possible but is always fascinating.
