Midnights: Taylor Swift’s Treatise On Agency

“It was all by design,” Taylor Swift coyly reminds us on ‘Mastermind’, the closer of her tenth studio album, ‘Midnights’. She’s long made a name for herself as pop’s queen of metaphor and mystique, with easter eggs and riddles galore (the ‘Lover’ house, with its mysterious set of rooms and boarded up corners; the richly woven fabric of 2020 sister albums ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’ delivered with no pre-warning; scarves and symbols and an ever-expanding Swift canon of truth). 

Swift has also famously held fans, the public, the media, and her contemporaries alike at arm’s length. And justifiably so – a career under scrutiny for every move, a maneater for singing about boyfriends and a cliquey bitch for singing about girlfriends; it’s unsurprising that Taylor’s most comfortable era so far has been the last couple of years. Lauded for her storytelling prowess on the third-person novellas of ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’, which veiled the personal in a shimmering shroud of fictional narrative, Swift was able to assume the guise of an isolated poet losing herself in her world, rather than a deer in the headlights of the world stage. ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’ came alongside the equally adored ‘Fearless’ (Taylor’s Version) and ‘Red’ (Taylor’s Version), the first wildly successful steps towards reclaiming her hostage back catalogue in a historic moment for the music industry. 

So after a few years reinventing herself as an earthy, ethereal singer-songwriter, ‘Midnights’ (an undeniably glittering high-production pop-album) is an about-turn. And not everyone was prepared for this. The frenetic weeks leading up to it raised numerous questions for fans, Swift drawing criticism for the numerous limited edition vinyl that meant you had to spend near on a hundred dollars in order to create that cute little clock from the back covers, the Target exclusives with tracks you couldn’t get anywhere else, the overt marketed-ness of the whole thing. 

Most surprising, perhaps (Taylor’s done special editions and countless collectible merch items, and they invariably sell out even amid aspersions) was a partnership with TikTok, that saw Taylor announce each track title with no riddles or secrets to figure out, and an IG Reels series where she gave a two-minute rundown of each track explaining precisely what each was about prior to the album’s release. We had it all on a plate. Even notwithstanding Swift’s guarded stance on social media, it meant that there was no room for excitable speculation about what was to come, because Taylor had just told us, and now we just had to wait and hear it. It felt like a recipe for anticlimax, with hotly anticipated tracks stopped before the hype could hit a peak. ‘Snow On The Beach’ with Lana Del Rey, for example, was dreamily theorized to be a classic Lana circa-2013 cocaine summer party girl anthem, but the buzz was halted when Taylor told us in no uncertain terms it was a woozy love song. 

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The beauty, with 20/20 hindsight after taking in ‘Midnights’, is that in knowing just what to expect, we actually didn’t know what to expect at all. Going into ‘Midnights’ with a handbook to each track didn’t detract from the hazy navy shimmer of its Jack Antonoff-sculpted soundscape, didn’t make sharp lyrical moments less piercing, didn’t make the unfurling of Midnights’s world any less spellbinding. What the rundowns and unambiguous explanations Taylor provided us with did do, though, is make sure we were hearing ‘Midnights’ on her terms. 

It’s tricky to pin down ‘Midnights’ as Swift’s most diaristic, most personal work – but in many ways, it is. Written backwards, about nights spanning her decades in the public eye, it’s vulnerable without the shield of narrative arc that ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’ had most explicitly, but that ‘Lover’, ‘Speak Now’, ‘Reputation’, ‘Red’ et al had – this record is about the media, this record is about John Mayer, this record is about Jake Gyllenhaal… Taylor had the span of each album to state her case, going into the nuances of each emotion.

But on ‘Midnights’, she isolates the thirteen ‘sleepless nights’, thirteen moments that keep her up, that she dwells on, thirteen of her most intimate, constant feelings, and condenses each one into a single song, and that’s it. Each fragment of internal turmoil only gets the runtime of a single song, a single mood, to lay itself bare. For that reason, it’s without a doubt Swift’s most introspective work, the tangible forces of time and hindsight running through each vignette – and not always favourably. Songs about cheating and self-questioning sit alongside the sweeter moments, Swift dissecting her own role in every scene she plays out, giving us a completely rounded perspective from a heart-wrenching unreliable narrator. 

‘Midnights’ is supposed to be read in this way – in its own self-examination, it encourages a sense of questioning. It’s no surprise at all that Swift wanted to reveal and explain each moment on her own terms before we as listeners inevitably leave the fingerprints of our own lived experiences all over it. As an artist who is used to her work being shredded and placed under a microscope, in making sure that we’re taking in ‘Midnights’ without mystery, Swift is taking absolute agency over her most personal writing, and by doing so, letting us find resonance in it without taking away from hers.

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‘Midnights’ is out now.

Words: Ims Taylor