Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ is Too Much, Not Enough, and Just About Right
“What do you get the girl who has everything?” is the question I imagine Taylor Swift asking herself when setting out to make Midnights, her tenth studio album and last week’s occupier of every spot in the Billboard top 10. There’s a reason why Taylor’s recently announced tour is “Eras” themed – she has simply had way too many of them. To be Taylor Swift in 2022 is to be constantly mythologizing different versions of yourself and reconciling your many contradictions.
There’s Country Taylor, a curly-haired ingénue with an accent of dubious origins; there’s the wide-eyed theater kid Taylor who appears on Fearless (2008) and Speak Now (2010); Pop Taylor, who loves New York and craves revenge; and of course, cottagecore Taylor, who has dominated Swift, Inc. since the pandemic releases of folklore and evermore (2020). For a while, it seemed like this might be her logical era endpoint, as the complexity of the folklore/evermore/woodvale (jk) universe drew in new fans and added gravitas to the Swift catalog. But the pandemic was also a major factor, since we were experiencing these records largely in isolation.
So now that the world is open again, Taylor has responded accordingly, releasing a collection of songs meant to be experienced in a group, at a party, or at least with copious amounts of “cheap-ass screw top rosé.” At face value, I am not in any way opposed to this approach: after all, my favorite Taylor Swift album is reputation (2017), a dark, dance-pop fever dream filled with vocoder vocals and industrial beats. It marked a massive tonal shift that was not entirely well-received, and in her Netflix documentary, Taylor concedes that many fans didn’t fully understand the album until they saw it performed. I count myself as one of them, having spent nearly a year hating on “Look What You Made Me Do” before getting blown away by the live performance of it. And despite the perceived superficiality of songs like these, it seems like Taylor has made a conscious choice to revisit the stadium banger genre.
Of course, not every song here is a banger per sé. There are, thankfully, no outright duds, but several ideas that feel half-baked. The most obvious of these is the concept for the album as a whole, which Taylor originally described as “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.” That’s certainly the case with tracks like “Mastermind” and “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” which focus on how Taylor views herself, but the plot gets lost when her gaze turns to others. How exactly is “Bejeweled,” a glitter-soaked kiss-off about wanting “the penthouse of your heart,” a song that would keep anyone up at night?
Even on a track like “Vigilante Shit,” which seems to slyly reference one of Taylor’s most difficult life experiences (the sale of her masters to her nemesis Scooter Braun), the overarching theme of the album remains slightly out of reach. There isn’t much self-reflection here; instead, Taylor waxes poetic about drawing cat eyes “sharp enough to kill a man” and reporting Braun’s crimes to the FBI (The cops are not your friends, Taylor!!). Many have pointed out that this song might feel more at home on reputation, but their argument ignores the underlying redemption arc that made that album so cohesive.
Curiously, the songs that hew closest to Taylor’s ambitious concept are the ones she added as an afterthought, the so-called “3am tracks” that were included as a surprise bonus three hours after the album was released. For those of us who stayed up frighteningly late to listen to this album (I’m in the UK, so my “midnight” is 5am), it was nothing short of an act of violence. And yet, most of these tracks are well worth the shock that they induced, even surpassing the quality of the core album in some cases. Just like on last year’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” Taylor reexamines a past relationship with an older man on “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” a late entry that becomes the album’s best song by a longshot. Barreling forward like a Wild West outlaw on horseback, it makes a convincing case for why Taylor should give all of her exes the “hindsight is 20/20” treatment.
Midnights works best in places like these, where Taylor draws from her past with the intention of explaining how she’s learned from it. Even on lead single “Anti-Hero,” where she explicitly tells us that she’s getting “older but just never wiser,” she seems to have much more perspective than in other parts of the album. Say what you will about the instantly-viral “sexy baby” line in this song, but Taylor’s not wrong to point out that most of her peers circa 2022 are younger, sexier, and better equipped to navigate the demands of Internet fame.
But more than anything else, “Anti-Hero” is just a whole lot of fun, which isn’t necessarily the case for brooding, synth-heavy tracks like “Maroon” and “Labyrinth.” By forgoing the winking quirkiness of “Anti-Hero,” those two songs align themselves more with “Lavender Haze,” the other standout track from the album’s original 13 songs. It’s tempting to wonder what might’ve been if Taylor had simply picked one lane here, although she clearly wasn’t in the mood to do so.
So, if Midnights is all over the place, what exactly will the “Midnights era” be remembered for? Maybe just that. At this point in her career, Taylor Swift has really, truly Done It All, and can mine inspiration from just about any artist or genre – including herself, a fictional and mythological character who is referenced at length throughout the record. The syntax in the title of “Question…?” recalls her 2017 single “…Ready for It?”, while the song also samples 2014’s “Out Of The Woods”; “Maroon” functions as a slightly darker counterpoint to Red (2012); “Karma” references the name of a rumored “lost album” that was supposedly scrapped in favor of reputation. Are you exhausted yet?
It’s all a little bit too much, but somehow, Midnights left me wanting a whole lot more. For all of the vivid imagery Taylor uses here (Paris! Partying! World War One!), not all of these metaphors land as smoothly as she seems to think they do. Maybe some of the lyricism needs to be thought through a bit more, or maybe she just needs to work a little less hard for it. A song like “Sweet Nothing,” for example, has very little going on except for the simple idea that Taylor’s ideal man wants (sweet) nothing from her; it’s concise, clever, and never feels forced. On the other hand, many of these tracks feel weighed down by verbosity, as if Taylor was trying to squeeze her entire Notes app into a three-minute song.
And yet, despite the album’s flaws, it does feel like the right place for Taylor Swift to land at this moment in her career. Although she veered into alternative territory with folklore and evermore, she is inarguably one of the biggest pop stars in the world, and still far too young to swear off the genre forever. Sure, Midnights seems a bit overwrought and over-engineered (probably with the Eras tour in mind), but it’s also a useful palette-cleanser after the seriousness of Taylor’s last two records. After all, even with the slew of Swift-inspired artists who have popped up in recent years, there are still only a handful who can craft a catchy hook as well as she can. It’s a skill that Taylor deserves the freedom to use, even if the end result is a starry-eyed, glittery, wine-soaked mess.
[Audrey Davis is a UK based writer, improviser, and singer-songwriter. She makes music as Elle Toro.]