Innovation Stalls on Midnights As Taylor Swift Does A Lot of 2012-Era Musical Recycling While Joe Alwyn Remains Her Eternal Muse

While most insomniacs would settle for watching TV all night, Taylor Swift has shown us yet again just how “Type A” she can be by using some of her many sleepless nights for productivity purposes. Resulting in what is now her tenth album, Midnights. And yes, ten studio albums put out over the course of sixteen years is very impressive indeed (not to mention the work put into her re-recordings thus far). It puts Swift closely behind Madonna, who started all the way back in 1983, yet “only” has fourteen studio albums (fifteen, for those who want to include I’m Breathless). Rihanna might have one-upped Swift if she had kept up the pace of releasing an album a year (skipping a release just once in 2008 and then waiting four years in between Unapologetic and Anti), but, no, she had to gravitate toward the fashion and beauty industry instead. Lana Del Rey is the only who comes close to Swift’s prolificness, having almost the same number of records out despite having gotten her first official record release (Born to Die) six years after Swift’s.

Maybe that’s part of why Swift felt the necessity to include her most comparable contemporary on this record, the only feature on the entire thing. But before we get to that, Swift starts us off with a very Harry Styles-esque tone and tempo (they did date, after all) called “Lavender Haze.” This being a title Swift grabbed when she heard it in a line from Mad Men and then confirmed that it was a popular turn of phrase in the 50s and early 60s. As a song that explores wanting to avoid having to deal with any of the media blitzkrieg that comes with someone of her fame level being in a relationship, she insists upon remaining in the lavender haze of a new love and its honeymoon period at all costs. Saying, “Get it off your chest/Get it off my desk” in that tone that reminds one of her saying, “Call it what you want, yeah,” Taylor indicates that she doesn’t care about the media’s bid for virality in dissecting her life. All she wants is to stay in her bliss. It’s therefore a song that proves you can be any age and get caught up in the googly-eyed version romance paraded in films and books, but the problems of adulthood infecting that kind of youthful outlook always tend to get in the way sooner or later.

“Maroon” subsequently continues the color palette motif (something Lana Del Rey is also fond of). Musically disparate from anything she’s ever done, it’s a sound that itself has been done by many before her. Which brings us to the fact that Midnights has somewhat stalled Swift’s thirst for something like innovation. Just as Del Rey, she’s started to get too comfortable in the familiar formulas provided by Jack Antonoff, who himself reached a peak with the sound on Midnights via his own band Fun’s 2012 record, Some Nights (which not only reminds one of the title Midnights, but also has a similar album cover involving a lighter), featuring the seminal single, “We Are Young.”

Musical genres come in cycles, that’s no secret. And the only person who was ever usually ahead of the curve on bringing those trends to the masses was Madonna (except starting in 2008, when she enlisted Timbaland, Pharrell and Justin Timberlake as producers on Hard Candy). Taylor herself has followed musical trends of the moment for most of her career, going the standard route of being a country star transitioning to pop (as Shania Twain and Faith Hill did). Even folklore and evermore were albums that tapped into a moment, speaking to the “stay home” laze of the pandemic era that Swift interpreted as “cottagecore.” Midnights seeks to not only shatter that era with 70s-inspired “going out” aesthetics, but also delves further back into the period when Swift was having her original success with Red in 2012. At that time, other acts like M83, Chvrches, Sleigh Bells and Phantogram were suffusing the landscape with the electropop/synth electronic sound that Swift eschewed for her careful treading along the line between country and pop.

Nonetheless, Swift lends her signature songwriting style involving lament to what has already been a well-established musical trope from ten years ago. As a requisite “what might have been” song about a former lover, “Maroon” addresses one of the five themes Swift said inspired the record: self-hatred, revenge fantasies, “wondering what might have been,” falling in love and “falling apart.”

In “Maroon,” a little bit of all five categories are embodied as she describes, “I wake with your memory over me/That’s a real fucking legacy, legacy (it was maroon)/And I wake with your memory over me/That’s a real fucking legacy to leave.” Luckily for the man she’s railing against in this song, the only person she hates more than him is herself, it would seem. At least, if the self-deprecating “Anti-Hero” is something to go by. This track, too, remains up-tempo and 80s-tinged as Swift rues, “It’s me/I’m the problem, it’s me.” Declaring, “It’s me” in that way she once said, “It’s you” on Lover’s “Cruel Summer.”

She provides one of her most evocative verses of the record when she adds, “Sometimes, I feel like everybody is a sexy baby/And I’m a monster on the hill/Too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city/Pierced through the heart, but never killed.” Lana Del Rey doesn’t seem to mind, willingly collaborating on the next song, “Snow on the Beach.” Alas, it is rather underwhelming as a musical marriage, with Taylor monopolizing all the vocals and Lana disappearing into the background (she got far more play in her collab with two other major pop stars, Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus). And, considering all the sexual tension between the two in terms of how much they orbit one another and echo each other’s songwriting style, maybe it was to be expected that this track would be an anticlimax.

Even the lyrics are somewhat reaching in terms of a “trying too hard” to be poetic bent, with Swift and Del Rey noting, “And it’s like snow at the beach/Weird, but fucking beautiful/Flying in a dream/Stars by the pocketful/You wanting me.” At the very least, Swift offers her best analogy since, “I come back stronger than a 90s trend,” with, “Now I’m all for you, like Janet.”

Going back to her more country twang (think: the Fearless era), “You’re on Your Own, Kid” shows us that Swift still has the Lana songwriting technique on her mind as she wields Del Rey’s favorite season to reference in the intro line, “Summer went away, still the yearning stays.” With a “tis the damn season” aura in its storytelling, Swift recounts, “I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this/I hosted parties and starved my body/Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss/The jokes weren’t funny, I took the money/My friends from home don’t know what to say/I looked around in a blood-soaked gown.” That latter image being an undeniable allusion to Carrie. A character that even tall, blonde and thin Swift could relate to as she was ostracized by the people in her school. Sort of like everyone walking off the dance floor at Christina Aguilera’s prom when the DJ played “Genie in a Bottle.”

Realizing that she never should have looked to someone else for salvation or validation anyway, she comes to the conclusion, “You’re on your own, kid/Yeah, you can face this/You’re on your own, kid/You always have been.” The “kid” part coming across like it was condescending inspiration from Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.

Using a vocoder to introduce the lyrics on “Midnight Rain” (because this record obviously needs to have a song with the album’s title somewhere in it), it’s the only sonic moment that doesn’t seem entirely generic as Swift proceeds to revert to her folklore/evermore narrative vibe (think: “The Last American Dynasty”). And, as was the case during “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” Swift reflects on small-town life and ultimately escaping it, this being a rumination, yet again, on the “what might have been” theme. So it is that Swift states, “My town was a wasteland/Full of cages, full of fences/Pageant queens and big pretenders/But for some, it was paradise.” “Some” like the boy she has “no choice” but to leave in order to pursue her big dreams in the big city. And yet, once she’s achieved her fame goals, she can’t help but “peer through a window/A deep portal, time travel/All the love we unravel/And the life I gave away/‘Cause he was sunshine, I was midnight rain.” But surely Swift would have thought the opposite if she had given up her career ambitions to play the little wife. Even so, in her late-night hours, she has to admit, “I guess sometimes we all get/Some kind of haunted, some kind of haunted/And I never think of him/Except on midnights like this.”

Commencing with a somewhat paltry imitation of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi”-style “portrait-painting,” “Question…?” describes, “Good girl/Sad boy/Big city/Wrong choices.” The intro has a brief tinge of “Blank Space” with the same light instrumentation that also uses “I remember” from “Out of the Woods.” A track about humiliation and ill communication, it’s one of the most deviating from a lyrical perspective. So, too, is “Vigilante Shit,” which continues her wannabe Lana angle (this time from an Ultraviolence era perspective, which, to re-emphasize the time period Swift is mirroring sonically, was released in 2013). Most notably when Swift wields the line, “Draw the cat eye, sharp enough to kill a man.” It glistens among all the rest of the tracks, with a moodier, more visceral backdrop than most of the other upbeat electro rhythms.

Almost as “glistening” but not quite is a song about a girl who loses her shine by putting all her self-worth into the hands of a man. And yes, “Bejeweled” provides some of Tay’s most “poetic” lyrics on Midnights. Including isms like, “Didn’t notice you walkin’ all over my peace of mind/In the shoes I gave you as a present” and “Familiarity breeds contempt/So put me in the basement/When I want the penthouse of your heart.” In the end, she decides, “What’s a girl gonna do? A diamond’s gotta shine.” That it does—which she already made vaguely clear on “mirrorball.”

Despite now contributing to the cultural lexicon with her own “Labyrinth,” it is the movie of the same name that will forever reign supreme. Plus, it’s a bit douchey to pre-quote oneself. Regardless, Taylor did just that with “Labyrinth” by incorporating the lyrics, “Breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out” into her commencement speech earlier this year at NYU. And even though such words might sound like part of a self-help book, the song is actually yet another ode to Joe Alwyn saving her from the sour taste (something Olivia Rodrigo knows about) that had lingered in her mouth from romances past. Accordingly, she sings, “Uh-oh, I’m fallin’ in love/Oh no, I’m fallin’ in love again/Oh, I’m fallin’ in love/I thought the plane was goin’ down/How’d you turn it right around?” Taylor will likely find that this metaphor is going to come back to bite her in the ass the next time there’s a major plane crash. Plus, being such a “New Yorker” nowadays, you’d think she’d know it’s still “too soon” after 9/11 to talk about plane crashes so casually.

Gears shift on the maudlin love theme with “Karma.” Never mind that MARINA already had an untouchable song called “Karma” from 2019’s Love + Fear, Taylor has decided to create her own edition. Where MARINA’s was inspired by the #MeToo movement, and particularly Harvey Weinstein, Swift opts, as usual, to make things more specifically about herself and go for Scooter Braun’s jugular. What’s more, she borrows from another electropop band that had a moment in the 00s, CSS, by saying, “Karma is my boyfriend.” CSS already used that metaphor to greater perfection with the lyric, “Music is my boyfriend” (which is how Taylor sounds when she replaces “music” with “karma”) on the single, “Music Is My Hot Hot Sex.”

Elsewhere, she uses highly specific details to allude to the fact that she’s talking about Braun as she accuses, “Spider boy, king of thieves/Weave your little webs of opacity/My pennies made your crown/Trick me once, trick me twice/Don’t you know that cash ain’t the only price?/It’s coming back around.” At the same time, this song also applies more than ever to Swift’s beef with Ye (formerly Kanye) that started all those years ago in 2009. And yes, Swift has definitely won that war as we watch Ye daily fall further from “grace.”

On the next track, again one must say: never mind that Florence + the Machine already had an untouchable song called “Sweet Nothing” with Calvin Harris (in, quelle coincidence, 2012), Swift wants to have one too. Hers being more slowed down and stripped back. All for the purposes of, what a shock, providing a bathetic homage to Alwyn as she croons, “I found myself a-running home to your sweet nothings/Outside they’re push and shoving/You’re in the kitchen humming/All that you ever wanted from me was nothing.” Then again, when remembering that it’s Taylor involved, “Sweet Nothing” could just as easily double as not-so-thinly concealed shade toward Harris.

Swift ramps up her Alwyn prose a notch on “Mastermind,” which allows her to spotlight her inner creep as she freely admits things like, “I laid the groundwork, and then/Just like clockwork/The dominoes cascaded in the line/What if I told you I’m a mastermind?/And now you’re minе/It was all by design.” Well, if one were Alwyn, maybe they would quote Taylor back to her by saying, “You need to calm down.”

In another verse, Swift plays up her “loser” days as an unknown youth, lamenting, “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid/So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since/To make them love me and make it seem effortless.” Naturally, it’s anything but—and this is part of why Swift has been called “calculated” so many times throughout her career. But maybe it was all worth it for Swift to be able to come up with a riposte like, “This is the first time I’ve felt the need to confess/And I swear I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian/‘Cause I care.” The ultimate curse, but one that many a Sagittarian is burdened with while pretending not to be.

While the standard edition of the album stops here, the “3am Edition” persists with “The Great War.” Once upon a time, that was what World War I was called, with the assumption that there wouldn’t be a second one. Now, Swift seems to be putting out this record at a moment when WWIII feels like an inevitability. Hence, the war metaphor being only too real despite most people of the millennial and Gen Z set only “experiencing” anything like battle in their video games. As she did on Lover’s “Afterglow,” Swift speaks of a great peace that will come after a great (relationship) war, assuring, “All that bloodshed, crimson clover/Uh-huh, the bombs were close and/My hand was the one you reached for/All throughout the Great War/Always remember/Uh-huh, the burning embers/I vowed not to fight anymore/If we survived the Great War.”

“Bigger Than the Whole Sky” continues the theme of “The Great War,” indicating a brutal, destitute aftermath as Swift sings softly, “No words appear before me in the aftermath/Salt streams out my eyes and into my ears/Every single thing I touch becomes sick with sadness/‘Cause it’s all over now, all out to sea.” A line like that is ripe with the “we could have had it all” sorrow that pervades so much of Midnights.

And, again ruminating on that theme, she inserts into the chorus, “What could’ve been, would’ve been/What should’ve been you/What could’ve been, would’ve been you.” Such lyrics also set things up for a later song called “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve.”

But not before “Paris.” Indeed, not one to shy away from cliches, perhaps it was overdue for Swift to have a song named after the “City of Love” (though it’s really the City of Light). But Edith Piaf-flavored this number is not as the up-tempo rhythms of earlier on the record return for Swift to croon, “Drew a map on your bedroom ceiling/No, I didn’t see the news/‘Cause we were somewhere else/Stumbled down pretend alleyways, cheap wine/Make believe it’s champagne I was taken by the view/Like we were in Paris, oh.”

Here it’s clear she’s using the city as an imaginary escape hatch (even though she could definitely just take her overused private jet there if she wanted to). Far from the scrutiny and as a place where people—even famous ones—assume they can remain in the “lavender haze” previously mentioned on the first track. So it is that Swift insists her and Alwyn’s love can stay protected if they just “fly over bullshit (as Beyoncé phrases it on “Alien Superstar”). If they just keep pretending “like we were somewhere else/Like we were in Paris.” The power of “pure imagination” also applies when interpreting the flashing lights of paparazzi cameras as nothing more that the shimmering lights of the Eiffel Tower (dimmed much earlier in the night now as a result of the energy crisis that won’t affect Swift). Thus, the lyric, “Let the only flashing lights/Be the tower at midnight.”

As one of only three tracks on Midnights produced by Aaron Dessner (though he did also co-write “Hits Different” on the deluxe version of the CD), “High Infidelity” possesses a distinctive tincture from the others crafted by Antonoff. Yet not so distinctive in the sense of Swift bringing up still another relationship past, this time likely referring to her transition from Calvin Harris to Tom Hiddleston circa 2016. With a retro video game-esque sound faintly punctuating the music in the background, Swift speaks directly to someone “like” Harris when she says, “You know there’s many different ways/That you can kill the one you love/The slowest way is never loving them enough.” The mention of the date April 29th also happens to be when “This Is What You Came For” was released. A.k.a. the single that prompted Harris to snap at his ex on Twitter with such venoms as, “I know you’re off tour and you need someone new to try and bury like Katy ETC but I’m not that guy, sorry.” This being a result of the real songwriter behind “This Is What You Came For”—Swift—being unveiled.

Call it just another relationship malfunction. Or “Glitch”—a song that refers to Tay’s enduring romance with Alwyn as a “glitch in the matrix” that the system never thought was possible or would last. As the briefest little ditty on Midnights at two minutes and twenty-eight seconds, Swift makes it count with “sweet nothings” like, “But it’s been two-thousand one-hundred and ninety days of our love blackout (our love is blacking out)/The system’s breaking down.” That number of days adding up to, you guessed it, the six years Swift and Alwyn have been together.

And, having been together that long, it’s no wonder Swift has to keep dipping back into her arsenal of exes for additional inspiration. As is the case on “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” which further hits us over the head with Swift’s preferred motif of the record: regret about a relationship. In this instance, she doesn’t wonder what might have been, but only wishes it had never been. The likely inspiration being John Mayer, as she mentions her age during this dalliance as nineteen (Lana, too, calls out being nineteen in “White Dress”—must be something affecting about that age). And, just as Jessica Simpson, Taylor would end up ruing the day she ever got into Mayer’s clutches, bemoaning, “God rest my soul I miss who I used to be/The tomb won’t close/Stained glass windows in my mind/I regret you all the time/I can’t let this go, I fight with you in my sleep” (this last line harkening back to the midnights/insomniac theme). That other beloved topic, revenge, is also peppered in with the lines, “Living for the thrill of hitting you where it hurts/Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.” So it looks like Jake Gyllenhaal is only a runner-up to Mayer’s supreme level of dickishness.

Sounding slightly like a romantic 80s ballad, the true closer of Midnights is “Dear Reader”—though, of course, what she really means is “Dear Listener.” Seeming to have enjoyed her life advice-giving status as a commencement speaker, she clearly had such a speech in mind when she wrote this track. For it offers “counsel” on how to live one’s life, mostly by staying true to oneself—yet also “bending” when necessary. As Jane Eyre did. And maybe that’s why Swift opted to reference Charlotte Brontë’s literary opus with the song’s title, famously taken from the mouth of the eponymous character when she announces, “Dear reader, I married him” (perhaps foreshadowing her own marriage to Alwyn). Even after the “him” in question goes blind in the fire, placing Eyre in the role of caretaker (but isn’t that what all women end up becoming when they consent to the part of “wife”?).

Painting herself as a potentially unreliable narrator when she says, “Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart,” Swift still does her best to sound cocksure when she adds, “And if you don’t recognize yourself/That means you did it right.” Even though, just a moment ago in the song that preceded this, she asserts, “I miss who I used to be.” This dichotomy, this push-and-pull between wanting to “remain as one is” while also wanting to burst out of the proverbial chrysalis is what invades Midnights. For we can hear Swift grappling with attempts at being “avant-garde” sonically (you know, for someone who still “has to be” commercial), while staying as true as she can be to the girl she’s always been, therefore the musical and lyrical style (lovelorn, vengeful, regretful, etc.) she’s always relied upon. Which is something of a shame in that someone at her height could release anything at this point without worry of losing her devotees.

To put it this way, Midnights is not Swift turning her back on the mainstream in any way remotely like what, say, Madonna did with Erotica thirty years ago (this particular album being released almost exactly the same day as Midnights, on October 20th). And if Swift is the artist she seems to want to be, more risk-taking is needed for future records. Something that goes beyond just another “solid win.”