Chronicle 2022: Taylor Swift - 'Midnights'
"Midnight... it's rainin' outside, yeah. He must be soakin' wet"
Taylor Swift - Midnights (pop)
Gee, are we gettin’ old, or what? 10 (12) albums in, all of them with classics, just after wrapping merely a decade and a half of a career? And we’re still doing, like, all of this? There’s got to be a reason for it, beyond mere inertia. Because Taylor Swift inertia seems like something that’s still very, very far away, in a way that many pop stars that came at the same time as, or even after, her, are already facing. This isn’t an underdog story, it was never going to be one, but the scales just keep getting bigger. A lot of behind-the-scenes money and power plays, absolutely, but the phenomenon around Taylor still feels too fresh, and refreshing, for this to be the case. The culture loves Taylor Swift – I love Taylor Swift – but why do we still love Taylor Swift now?
Why now, still? What has changed? Something must’ve changed, that’s the way things go. Because, in my mind (and I know I’m not alone here), the Taylor Swift that I’ll always hold dearest hit her peak in 2012, with her fourth album Red. In 2012, I was a dweeby little 13 year-old snot who wouldn’t so much as respect Taylor Swift until 4 years down the line, and the connection with that album has only strengthened and deepened. That Taylor sang about the “hands of fate”, beginning again, the thought of someone still thinking about you in a way that caused her pain and not pride, falling in love with strangers while laughing at that idea, finding someone who wasn’t a self-indulgent taker and dedicating him a ukulele lullaby, dancing to (and for!) someone’s memory, love as something both red and something that could symbolize a golden age. In a few words, life opening up to her for the first time ever, and realizing the magnitudes within her, and those around her. “Don’t you see the starlight, starlight? Don’t you dream impossible things?”
But that’s me. That’s the Taylor I love the most, among so many others. But the way tides have been shifting lately, likely aided by her ongoing process of rerecording her first 6 albums, seems to indicate that the plurality among what Taylor has to offer has been intensifying. People revisiting and revisiting, often out of their own volition. The high romance found in 1989 is still being vindicated, but the high-ambitions of her earlier work have manifested in the fan-favorite “Enchanted”, a song which is up there with her best. There’s also the stranger, harsher deep cuts on reputation that have gotten streaming traction (including album highlight “Don’t Blame Me”). Or the way her domestic-life settling album Lover was a lot more ignored by mainstream audiences, and yet cuts like “Cruel Summer” and “Paper Rings” hit the fans with time. Let’s not even address the milieu of deep cuts from her pandemic albums, where both projects have found deeply beloved songs within the fandom for their fanciful writing and sonics, staring at the woods with yearning and precision (constant standouts have been: “exile”, “august” and “betty” from folklore; and “champagne problems”, “gold rush” and “no body, no crime” from evermore).
We should start asking the question: how do we tie all these together, if, indeed, we even can? With Taylor’s latest announcement of “The Eras Tour”, recapping her entire career, she might be willing to give us some pointers, but we also have to draw a line. And I think there are ways to do that in a cohesive manner.
Taylor will always rightfully be praised for her lyrical mastering, but a lot of people might get swept up in the change of aesthetics and not realise that, while she’s constantly questioning and considering her core beliefs, they always have been structured in very romantic, Disney-like hopeful aspirations, and aspirations that need to be met with that exact same intensity. Even with the swearing and the occasional bitter attack, Taylor’s writing implies that someone (not always her) gets the upper hand. There’s rarely ever a point in Taylor’s music – outside of some isolated moments at the end of Lover – where there’s peace or even squares. She’s a woman of chaos, one who needs to create chaos in order for things to keep moving inside her head. Even if she reaches a moment of contentment, that fulfilment can only come after battling and turmoil. “2AM, who do you love? I wonder 'til I'm wide awake”, “Killing me slow, out the window / I'm always waiting for you to be waiting below”, “Back when I was living for the hope of it all”, “Went home and tried to stalk you on the internet / Now I've read all of the books beside your bed”, “I dropped your hand while dancing / Left you out there standing”, “Love made me crazy / If it doesn’t, you ain’t doin’ it right”. These are all lyrics from the songs mentioned in the previous paragraph. This is what people go for.
But obviously, addressing the sonics is something quintessential (this is music, after all!). Part of the reason I’ll hold Red above the rest of her material is partially because of that expansion of the sound, with many people on deck working towards different musical ideas alongside her: Nathan Chapman, Max Martin, Dan Wilson, Jacknife Lee, Butch Walker, Jeff Bhasker. Incredible names who, with the exception of Martin, wouldn’t stick around for long. The Taylor we’ve been dealing with since that album is one that kept her sound in a state of growth, with everything becoming bigger and louder (that Swedish Martin production was the key), until it couldn’t. Her flirting with electronics hit a point where she had to step back after reputation, more of a pop music curiosity than a proper good album, in part because that meant dealing with a fierce sonic palette that her songwriting clearly wasn’t interested in pursuing.
Enter Jack Antonoff. The Taylor Swift/Jack Antonoff partnership has been one that lacks a real point of comparison in the history of pop music (what, Michael Jackson/Quincy Jones? U2/Brian Eno? Justin Timberlake/Timbaland? None of these are good parallels). Antonoff’s sound has been one that’s been widely praised and derided by both fans and critics. He can be capable of great things: lush sonic landscapes, combining the open air of Americana with the dark illusions of ambient pop, for one. He can also have very soft production edges, too much dead air in between sounds (not aided by his mixers), and, frankly, consistently cheap kick-snare tones. What does happen with nearly everyone he works with is that, no matter how grand the scope of the music, the melody-making steers towards an airy coo, with many vocal layers having to be placed (harmonies included) in order for the melodies to really stick. If everything clicks, we get something truly moving. If one thing is somewhat out of place, because everything is so fragile, the whole thing runs the risk of becoming flimsy and feeble.
Taylor took notice of that trend, and utilised it to her own advantage. Starting with his work on reputation, evolving a lot more clearly on Lover, her melodies quietly quit the belting that was there in Martin’s production, the notes started to have smokier tones, the cathartic moments were lighter in her delivery, her voice blushed in quirky spots of tension and release at the same time, she accompanied herself a lot more with her lower register for backup, and the placement of her vocals in the mix meant that she could say a lot more without worrying about the melody because her voice would be in a sonic place of clarity. When Aaron Dessner of the National came in as her main producer for folklore and evermore, she went even further, and she explored said aforementioned lower register with a lot more richness and fullness to the sound, so she could be prepared to give her higher range a lot more gravitas.
A great development, with great results, and one that will allow her to carry on singing these tunes when she’s 60, but there is an ideological indicator that is both bothersome and concerning. No longer the lovestruck teenager, these melodies, deeper and more scaled down, were meant to indicate “growth”, a sense of realising that the passions of past youth are now, not only behind her, but beneath her. Not surprising, of course; in today’s world, flashiness and brashness are in tragic cahoots with the vague notion of adulthood, and that’s the notion that Taylor’s been exploring after the reputation fiasco left her wanting to leave the pop glamour behind. Lord forgive emotional honesty being paired up with screamin’ and cryin’ and perfect storms!
All of this gets us to this new goddamn album. Produced entirely by Swift and Antonoff (with 2 tracks aided by Sounwave, Keanu Beats and Jahaan Sweet), the reaction it’s gotten from a lot of people has really puzzled me. In a few words, Midnights is… kind of a very normal pop album. One with obvious hooks, obvious singles, obvious sounds it’s taking from. It follows the in-sound of semi-detached, ‘chillwave’ nighttime vibes with a dash of 80s revivalism (though one left in a vacuum), with future bass touches and generated musical drama. It’s probably the most with-the-times album Taylor’s done since 1989. It’s not chasing trends (for the most part), but it’s staying in touch with everything else. If anything, you could even say there’s a lot of taking back sounds and ideas from all her albums from 1989 onwards, and reutilizing them – a lot of songs here feel like continuations of previous tracks, if they aren’t that explicitly. If Midnights isn’t going to be anything “new”, and not that it should be, it’s because it paves the way for a reflection of a stunning career.
What we’re hearing here is a Taylor in a category that she knows just about no one else has. She’s reached the podium of total omniscience, even after she lost it for a little while there, and that ‘click’ that she assumed would happen after she “only saw daylight” on Lover just hasn’t come 3 years later. After a period of losses and questioning, this is the moment where she needs to prove that she still has something to prove, even when reality indicates otherwise. The music on this album is in constant conflict with itself, the kind that needs the reaffirmation of others in order to not lose whatever grasp on reality it has left. Taylor very much knows and acknowledges her insularity, as the biggest pop star in the Western world, but having her realise how much that weighs on her relationships is what keeps her from once-and-for-all tearing down the systems that have helped her get there. She’ll spend the whole album revisiting the same points, to see who has the upper hand.
Which leads us to the start of some of the problems within the sonic world of Midnights. With the entrance, and eventual takeover, of Antonoff, really kicking in on Lover, Taylor’s way of song structuring has gotten a lot looser and much less refined. Most of the songs from that album onwards have rarely felt like proper songs, with a start and an end, and more like sections strung together; fragments that aren’t tied strong enough for one to lead into the other. That could be forgiven a lot more on the folklore and evermore albums, where those snapshots didn’t need to stay together, but this is pop music. What, exactly, am I supposed to do with those silent seconds between the tense “And by the way… I’m going out tonight” and the loose “Best believe I’m still bejeweled!” on “Bejeweled”? What about the eyes-wide-shut verses of “Snow on the Beach” followed by the fermented chorus? Are the “yeah-oh-yeah”’s in the pre-chorus of “Lavender Haze” really efficient in taking us to the elevated hook? It constantly feels like we’re doing one thing, and then another, rarely ever going somewhere precise. That’s especially a problem where some sections are clearly better than others. One of the reasons “Anti-Hero” was pushed as a lead single and has been widely accepted as one is because all of its sections (verse, chorus, bridge) are about as good as each other, but the compositional inner cohesion is sorely lacking in these tracks.
That might be at odds with another problem this album has, which is Taylor’s rapidly growing use of ‘gimmicks’ in order to create melodies. I call them ‘gimmicks’ because they don’t so much as denote a songwriting style, like creating melodies out of elongated syllables was to her for years, as much as they feel like a clutch when she feels the need to embellish what’s already there. The one major ‘gimmick’ on Midnights is the upending of the final syllable of a word, often the last word in the bar, at the very last second, and very abruptly, just for a moment. Kind of turning the word into an open question by emphasising it. There’s no melody in there, other than the diminishing returns of messing with established lines to turn a catchy line into an annoying one. It’s there on the verses of “Snow on the Beach” (“One niight!”, “Ii!”), the title word in “Bejeweled” (“Best believe I’m still bejeweled”), the chorus of “You’re On Your Own, Kid” (“From sprinkle splashes to fireplace ashes!”), outright grotesquely abused in the bridge of “Question…?” (“SuitablLLE?!... and riIIGHHT?!”). Sometimes the intent is to play coy, others it’s being sassy. It never comes off well.
These would be petty grievances just for about any other big mainstream pop star, but we’re dealing with a brilliant melody maker here. Plenty of times on this album, I hear something and think that she should be above it. There are certain ticks that working with Antonoff bring in her that put her in some kind of state of near-complacency – and that, too, does apply to Antonoff. A good amount of songs here have the ‘midnight’ sort of pulse, where everything’s still up in the air and the end of a day could be the start of a new one, but his method is to mute as much as possible. A lot of these sounds simply have trouble sustaining themselves because of his constant use of groggy kicks and tippy-tap snares (“Midnight Rain”, “Question…?”, “Labyrinth”, even “You’re On Your Own, Kid”) that suggest nothing even among their weakness. As soon as I enter some of these cuts, I want to like them more, but the bass foundations for these songs fall out of line with what they’re sustaining. There’s a method to holding back without resorting to the basic, and the simplistic.
But still, there is so much that these two nutjobs got right. As problematic as these issues are (and I won’t be as forgiving next time if all this persists), they do form part of a sonic worldview that works, and is built for neither of them to make themselves feel cozy for too long. There’s a lot to Midnights that indicates a pressure to build upon what Taylor’s done, and one where the chaos we discussed earlier has to be subsided, or at least, find other ways to manifest itself. And this is Midnights’s magic trick: the restlessness, sleeplessness, thoughts and situations and people to mull over and think about in the middle of the night, they’re all being treated and given due time not only with respect, but with outright beauty. The ugly moments don’t have to weigh you down, and you can find ways to fight your way through them with, for starters: jokes, struts, planning, confessionals, stories, daydreaming, companionship (even by yourself). The suggestions this album makes aren’t to pull you down, but to acknowledge those flaws and give them due grace. That’s Taylor’s wonderful humanism.
You feel it on “You’re On Your Own, Kid”, the closest follow-up on this album to the Dessner-produced projects of 2020 – funny, since it’s shorter than just about all of the songs on them. But it captures the necessary feeling of going back, and returning to those more vulnerable positions, a snapshot of pure remembrance, and realising that you’re not exactly in that position anymore. Taylor accesses a younger version of her vocal timbre to recount those experiences that still don’t seem too far away from her own, current isolation, before the song builds its way to a climax, like running in a busy street. My two favorite moments are the evocation of “So long, Daisy May”, which is immediately followed by strengthened synths, echoing that inner strength building up, eyes picking up on something that wasn’t there before; and the early resolution of the galloping bridge, as she goes, “Everything you lose is a step you take”, where an organic snare takes over the mix for that one line, before disappearing, but letting you know it was always there. It’s a summary, but one that needs to remember for all of this to make sense. She ends every chorus with the title line, and while the explanation as to why is there, she manages not to turn it into a negative.
I’ll also applaud that sense of beauty on “Anti-Hero”, a song just as colorful and far catchier, though not as perceptive to these flashes of ideals. The pacing is a problem, again; every section gets louder than the previous in a fine way, but I never feel the song properly pops, and everything ends up lurking in the background. And as much as Taylor not taking the high road and going “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me” in the chorus is refreshing to hear all things considered, it feels too self-referential a phrase, and sung with no humor, for it to stick the landing. But in the second half of a chorus, she comes across a wonderful line and melody: “I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror”, where one vocal is singing it with the resignation of the rest of the song, while the other one in her higher range shows a much more frustrated side to the affair. And right after it, the brief instrumental line before the verses is incredible: it feels like a wrapping up, a gentle one too, of the song’s nasty self-criticism, like a brief moment that goes beyond respite and is as direct a statement of hope as this album could achieve. She claims “it must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero”, and the world responds with brimming, yearning, primal acceptance.
I also have a soft spot for some of the more diva cuts on the album, although none of them stand out as highlights. For all the grievances I’ve given “Bejeweled”, and I still have some left – for one, try as she might, it’s really hard making a compelling melody out of a word as ugly as “bejeweled” –, the dark impulses ingrained within her that make us see how easy it is for her to take this persona are thrilling to hear: how she dismantles a man before casually dropping that she’s going out, her own call-and-responses in the second verse. All of which make “I can still make the whole place shimmer” bite a lot harder. Props for ending the song earlier than I expected, too! “Karma” is a lot better, with how the synths reverberate every couple of bars, like a broken engine, and Antonoff’s adorning of Taylor’s words (glass gently falling as “you’ll see the glare” pops up). Taylor’s lyrical invocations are a tad baseless at times (“Spiderboy”???), and the karma metaphor is overextended in the chorus once she compares it to a cat and an acrobat, but the first half of that chorus has something going. Treating karma as: her boyfriend, a God, the breeze in her hair on the weekend, and a relaxing thought, and then, rubbing it in your face how she’s benefited from it and you haven’t, “Aren’t you envious that, for you, it’s not?”, with a glaring stare in the lower harmony (the main lesson she took from country music), is as heavy a flex as she could pull. Because she says the quiet part out loud, that she’s won and no one else has, and for a second, unlike the rest of the album, it doesn’t fall back on her; at times, you may not admit it, but it can be empowering to see others below you. That is a midnight thought.
“Vigilante Shit” is garbage. I can vibe with it, I can enjoy it to some extent, if only because I’m a big enough Taylor Swift fan to put up with some of her bullshit from time to time. But it’s simply not good. It’s been 4 years since “youshouldseemeinacrown”, and those are the kinds of songs in Billie Eilish’s discography that are going to continue ageing the worst. “Vigilante Shit” is actually quite cohesive, but it builds to an empty hush of revenge moralism, as if that were possible, that feels both like a pose and a regression to the parts of reputation that Taylor never felt comfortable doing. And this time, we don’t even get any of the theatrics, just ‘dark’ bass and poor enunciation. Too many people have been complaining about the “sexy baby” line in “Anti-Hero”, and not enough have been talking about “Someone told his white-collar crimes… to the FBI”, which I can’t even call a metaphor, because it’s not based on anything else in the text, and it’s sung so ominously, as if it meant anything. In a long line of Taylor songs about getting even instead of getting sad, this one doesn’t even want to approach the enthusiasm that comes with it, maybe because Taylor’s avenging someone else, and not herself. Her hair-rolling delivery of “I’m on my vigilante shit againnnnnnnn” reeks of tryhard.
Yet, that’s the kind of chaos that Taylor longs for. “Midnight Rain”’s thing is that the chorus is pitched down a notch or two, like a house beat except not at all, and the main proposal is, “He wanted it comfortable, I wanted that pain”, and it’s jiggled with to the right frequency, where a distant voice feels too close for comfort. I don’t get much else out of the song, but that voice serves as an interesting alter ego that winds up mirroring Taylor’s own experiences, and eventually finds itself in the second half of “Labyrinth”, a far more elaborate song. Taylor’s opening lines, aching towards those high notes she can’t fully reach, with a church organ in the background and bubbly synths, makes for a deep burning ambiance where all the poise of previous songs leaves her in what might be the most lonesome moment on the entire album. It’s the one where the ruins are far more abandoned, the instrumentation can go for more but outright won’t, and Taylor’s lyricism can only bounce back to the same feeling of falling in spite of herself, and being taken away from loneliness (or a plane crash), as something that sets her on a course, but doesn’t free her. It feels as though she’s finally reckoning with the consequences of that, and how that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
So, it’s interesting to see on opposite sides of this album, how she stays dealing with that newfound domesticity, after a 6 year long steady relationship. There’s the rockier side of things to the opener “Lavender Haze”, which I find to be a darker version of Lover’s “I Think He Knows”, this time with the oh-so-unwelcome presence of Sam Dew on backing vocals – second time this year his plastic bag voice (and writing) damn near open a big album, and the first time, it was Kendrick! But the original giddiness is gone, and this time, it’s replaced with a conscious effort to maintain that love bubble, while also refusing to stick to the “1950s shit” in order to not lose the feeling. It’s a wobbly song, where Taylor’s ethereal hook is contrasted heavily with the heavy coloring of words like “melancholia”, the shades turning darker. The resolution in the bridge is one of the few remarkable ones on the album, where sexual tension is brought up, and the text implies cheekiness, but Taylor herself evokes euphoria that can only come from desperation. Contrast that with the lullaby-like “Sweet Nothing”, written with her current partner, and it also feels like a follow-up to a previous song: in this case, reputation’s closer, “New Year’s Day”. Similar rusty keyboard, a hummable melody, and while the words themselves indicate a certain conformity that can turn to complacency, Taylor doesn’t seem to mind it. “I find myself-a-runnin’ home to your, sweeet nothings”, remarking both the sweet and the nothing in that melody. If she really is too soft for the outside world or not, it doesn’t matter at that moment.
You won’t find any parallels in Taylor’s work for “Snow on the Beach”, however. She brings in Lana del Rey and uses her as the songwriter that she is, but keeps her at bay as a performer, solely underlining the aspects that Taylor wants to highlight. It’s a song that details the moment of falling, seeing the other person fall with that same intensity, and slowly picking up on how unusual that can be. It’s a song for unlucky situations, where the battle is set to be lost, and yet it’s all coming down the way dreams intended. The bridge is too blunt and stupid (the Janet Jackson reference tips me off that it’s Lana’s writing), but Antonoff’s production reaches a moving state, one where the characters feel both inside and outside of what’s happening. The notion of snow at the beach, with “stars by the pocketful”, is created with an ear for a passing-by mellotron and a strumming white electric guitar, and the instrumental is kept at an arms’ length the whole time. It feels like an illusion, one too distant yet suddenly everywhere, and nothing dares stop it. Antonoff’s hushed abilities are used for great wonder, and Taylor’s newfound way of never looking at definitive statements of love, concluding simply with, “It’s comin’ down”, awestruck instead of relentless, makes for a burning moment of intimacy.
The entirety of Midnights, good as it is, can’t help but peak early. The abstract phasing of the midnight world, where everything can occur yet also stay completely still, is found to stunning effect on the second track, “Maroon”. I can put on any other song from this album at any given point and enjoy it, but “Maroon” stops me dead in my tracks. Aesthetically, it does exactly what the rest of the album’s doing, with the same writing techniques and production gear. But all those could-be fragile elements turn this song into a seething moment of all the dominos hitting the right spot. Like most of the album, it’s a direct follow-up to one of her classic songs, “Red” (both songs are also the second track on their respective albums); this time, another lost relationship, but the loving isn’t gone, it’s very much there, and it’s not red. It’s not golden, like she once suggested. It’s burgundy, and scarlet, and maroon. The love has deepened, like the wine she and her lover were sharing and spilling, and now it’s something they can look up to as they stare at the sky. It’s a cosmic vision of love, no longer tied to strict ideals of color, now being guided by something beyond both of them.
That’s a feeling incredibly tough to describe, a kind of divine intervention where the world and your heart are sharing the same layers. The sound here feels subtly overwhelming, even if it never has to aim for a high climax. The shaky drum pattern with a lot of unused air in the production, a richening synth bass that feels too elevated, an electric guitar that paints the sky and still leaves enough room for city lights to come out. But they aren’t mere street lights – they’re lights atop a building post-sunset, and the pair feel smaller. Taylor’s chorus is hesitant at first as she paints a vivid picture of dancing in New York, no shoes, before it picks up on how it all looks, and the harmonies are organic and lively at first, before they turn robotic. Yet, hindsight is what makes this song. The initial melody, sung in her rich low register, indicates looking back at a love that only grew darker as it went, and she can pretend it isn’t so, sass her way out of it, but with every iteration of the chorus, every time she gets lost in said lower register, the flushes of older instincts come back, pitched up. There’s so much space, effectively untouched, to signify that quivering feeling. Arguably for the first time, Taylor revisits a love… and she’s hesitant of her own memory and her own emotions. She can only look up, and feel as though time stopped.
The different ways in which Taylor reveals herself, always calculated and thought out, kind of take on a different tone when a song like “Maroon” is in the equation. Suddenly, that deepening of senses makes the self-loathing of “Anti-Hero”, the recounting of her humiliation of higher social classes on “Question…?”, the fear of “Labyrinth”, the fronting of “Vigilante Shit” and “Karma”, the swallowed pride of “You’re On Your Own, Kid”, all be seen through the lens of someone who was widely aware of everything that was going on, and kept resignifying those moments throughout the years. She was able to capture and remember, but that came at the cost of shifting her vision to understand the “why” of her actions, and those answers couldn’t help but change and be changed. She stares at the ghost of her former flame, and must admit, “I see you every day now”.
The album’s conclusion is “Mastermind”, a song where all the potential errors of her ways turn out to have a stupefying effect, one she still needs to adjust to, but realises she’s not alone in. A recounting of how her “cryptic and Machiavellian” mind works and functioned in order to get the man she’s with now, all told in a slurred chorus where the need to confess outweighs her typical clarity. I feel the song’s a tad too overwritten, but it’s carried through a sense of pulse where Taylor gets enveloped in the sound without noticing it… kind of like her plan to get her current partner. She’s scared of her self-proclaimed “mastermind” status, but she’s also proud of it. The melody reaches for the ominous, but ominous with a wink not directed at us. The song ends like a door silently shutting, and we’re left out of it. She and her man can go and create new plans together, for themselves and others, and we won’t be able to see through them. But he will her. Someone else understands that beauty.
I can’t outright call Midnights a great album. I’ve written many words about it, but there are so many better albums this year that deserve this kind of scrutiny. Again, most of the parts, I’ll take them in bits and pieces: the choruses of “Snow on the Beach”, “Midnight Rain” and “Karma”; the soundscapes of “Lavender Haze”, “You’re On Your Own, Kid” and “Labyrinth”; the instrumental musical phrase of “Anti-Hero”; and “Maroon” is the one song that currently stands as one of her best ever. That’s the thing, though: I go to Taylor for many things that she’s no longer interested in providing. These snapshots are the direction she’s currently headed, and seems as determined in sticking to as ever. But we keep doing this, and we keep writing and consuming and thinking about material like this, with this degree of quality. Why?
Maybe because this kind of larger-than-life figure, that stands tall among so many others, who has reshaped the industry twice or thrice over, has, in her own way, an aching display of humanity that would die if it wasn’t heard. Not that she needs my help for that, or anyone in particular’s, but we have a figure dealing with her inner workings in ways that still hold the mirror to us. Pop artists like Taylor are sheltered and held back, she’ll admit to that herself – but the pulse within the goddamn music is what makes us constantly reconsider her status. She can sell you the story of the underdog, make you feel like one even if you aren’t, and make you reconsider why you are one. She may be isolated, but she’s not unaware. And that’s important. In a world meant for us to lose sight of true, hard-earned feelings, where it sometimes feels as though I’ve lived and loved as much as I could, right at the time when I couldn’t appreciate that beauty, Taylor’s music is the fierce reminder that no. There is more. There is always more.
That Taylor, from 10 years ago, from Red, obviously isn’t here anymore; what started as seeing the starlight and dreaming impossible things turned into a maroon sky, with snow coming down. The language has changed, but the surprises aren’t gone; that ideal, of interactions by way of tangible and empathetic storytelling, can’t be overstated. The longing for a connection won’t leave, but the resignation that this is all there is could kick in at any point. And that will happen faster if we, too, let ourselves go. And the ‘ironic’, self-deprecating nothings of the world win. Taylor’s still here, as a reminder of how we think and act to keep that head up through the nights. Even without the privilege, the isolation, or karma on our side, the fight has to continue. She is a mirrorball after all, right?
3am Edition
At first, I didn’t know what to make of these 7 new tracks that dropped 3 hours after the album proper. Are they bonus tracks? Are they a continuation of the album’s themes? Are they merely loosies? And then I got to “Paris”, which opened with the lines, “Your ex-friend's sister met someone at a club and he kissed her / Turns out, it was that guy you hooked up with ages ago / Some wannabe Z-lister” and I immediately catalogued these songs as something else. These songs aren’t Midnights; they aren’t midnights. “3am Edition”? Absolutely. It’s when the insomnia has kicked in for too long, now the night has fewer places to go to, and the thoughts are increasingly denser, more paranoid, more stuck, far pettier, and the things you try to avoid as you pass the time can’t be put aside anymore. Taken as an entirely different project (which is the right way to go), this EP of sorts might be Taylor’s bleakest body of work ever. No sense of escape, no way out. It’s 25 minutes, and yet, it feels longer than some of her hour-long albums.
The thing is almost evenly split between Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. This time, for the most part, Dessner seems to be playing Antonoff’s game, and his cuts are far more electronic pop-leaning than they are his usual brand of alternative (with one exception). But even Antonoff seems to be playing around with entirely different equipment. The songs feature more acoustic fiddling; the mixing is nowhere near as shaky as the album proper, even if the engineers remain the same; the synths are still digital, but nowhere near as proudly artificial. The songs feel like moments of incandescent saturation, likely aided by Taylor’s drinking motif.
As for the songs themselves, the yearning is what pushes them forward. There’s no sex, there’s no humor, there’s just pining and remembrance to the point where those stop being an asset and become outright useless. There are no positive conclusions here. The aforementioned “Paris” sees Taylor regressing to a way of loving that indicates tension, conflict, words barricading until they suffocate, “I’m so in love that I might stop breathing”, as necessary components; and Antonoff takes note of that, and the production becomes much busier, to the point where it indicates a kind of self-destruct mode due to desperation. Being in Paris as a way to ignore everything else feels, at times, comforting, like in the breakdown before the chorus, but also something that would mean she would be with herself all the time. Is that the best of company for her at these hours?
At times, the Antonoff cuts end up going to extremes. “Glitch” stands out as a particularly bad song, where Sam Dew once again aids the song with unwanted sass, and Taylor’s lyrical idea of this new romance working as a malfunction or a glitch is too cold for the intimacy she wants to create (props to the sandy trip-hop drums, though). Closer “Dear Reader”, the one song that could musically fit in Midnights, is a good conclusion to the arc of Taylor trying and failing to disconnect herself as the role model many see her for, as an unreliable narrator of other people’s stories, and has one great melody in “Never take advice from someone who's… falling apart” which leads to an acknowledgement of who she can be on her worst moments. But the detached vibe of the song doesn’t work for this kind of more direct content; the distant space where this is taking place muddles the song’s own message.
But Taylor uses that levity she gives herself, by getting out the back door and speaking on behalf of no one else, to admit harsher truths. “High Infidelity” sees Aaron Dessner’s electronic beeps taken from “closure” and are put into a heavy blast of words. I feel the song runs a little too long – the final minute with the cheery adlibs and the receding to the first verse could have been cut, and the song would’ve been maybe even more powerful. This time around, Taylor is the one cheating. She owns up to it understanding the weight of her actions, because she knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end. With that power, with that upper hand, she decides to twist the knife. Beyond letting him put on his records and regret her (and regret meeting her), the main stinger is, “Do you really wanna know where I was April 29th?”. It’s not the importance of the date (although many Swifties will draw conspiracy theories for years to come), it’s the performance: that melody is hushed, repressed, sung not with a smirk but a bitter look. An ace up her sleeve. She knows what can drive him mad, and she will use that card if she were so inclined to cruelty, because cruelty is the main language she understands at this time. “Do I really have to tell you how he brought me back to life?”. You don’t treat the one you love like that with a conscious, awake mind. Unless, of course –
But beyond yearning, or confusion, or anger, what this collection of tracks has more than any other Taylor album is grief. Grief of many things, some more tangible than others. “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” is the grief of a younger Taylor, one before a scarring relationship at 19 with an older man, and the main thing bothering her is that she can’t escape the trauma; she can’t simply let it go. Once a source of pride for her romantic tales, now it’s something that haunts her, and it’s visible. A Dessner cut, funny enough, this may be the first time I feel this is Taylor Swift singing on top of an instrumental by the National (even more so than the song on evermore actually featuring the National), and the chamber alt-rock vibes invite for a saddened, riddled religious tale where every section tries to top the previous one, and yet none of them can erase that hurt. There’s no self-pity, because that would mean there’s no movement. This song paces around and can’t find a spot to rest in.
“Bigger Than The Whole Sky” is where the grief is most evident. It could be about a lost relationship with missed potential, as much as it could a real person gone too soon; “I’m never gonna meet what could’ve been, would’ve been, what should’ve been you”. It contemplates without moving much, and kind of stays brooding until it’s forced to end. Antonoff’s arsenal of sepia synths accompanies a standard chord progression and turns it into a night with no stars, and the strummed slide and acoustic guitar recall that 90s Mazzy Star-like alt-country vibe in their fractured state. The drums, meanwhile, in a confined space, indicate doom – an abyss not out of sight. The decision to sing the cooing melody in a lower octave for the final chorus was a simple but correct one, as the track ends because it must, but nothing gets resolved.
The one song where the grief may be more scattered, but makes it even more poignant and terrifying, is “The Great War”, another Dessner cut, and the best song out of these 7. It’s the one that’s most concerning, the one where Taylor’s vision of love as chaos is dealt with, and properly resolved. The electronic sheen points towards a marching drum beat that never stops, synths vaguely following the main melodies, harmonies and vocoders that punish Taylor, like past echoes, and her constant vocabulary of old time war as a conflict within a relationship. The melodies never soar, but the harmonies tiptoe around glee, or joy, at the thought of battling. The striking moment is the near-bombast of the bridge, with wonderful singing (“something biggeeeer”, the break in “been betrAyed”), before it scales back to a cautious melody, not allowing the song to crescendo, as she notices there is someone else on the other side that she cares for. So the conclusion, the lead-in of the final verse into the chorus, is a resolution: “And we will never go back to that bloodshed”. Her singing is affirmative, and committed to that promise. She will stick to their truce. But she will also miss the thrill of the fight. That chaos is essential to her in ways nothing else can’t compare to.
Maybe, that’s why a fair amount of people, mainly the ones who championed folklore and evermore more than they ever did her pop material, were a lot more eager for these bonus cuts than the album itself. They reveal many of the same truths as the standard edition of Midnights, just without any of the kindness to herself or others, or the easy-going moments of relief, or thought that, (could it be!), a happy, fulfilling ending isn’t out of reach. I appreciate that this “3am Edition” is only 7 tracks long because, as good as most of these tracks are, their wearying negativity where there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, and the main hope you can get is that the person who’s been telling you all this is 4 drinks down and can’t be trusted, is what could lead someone like Taylor to surrender. I don’t suspect many snobs know better, but Taylor does. She may need a long, good night’s sleep, or something a tad stronger. One way or another, stepping in like this indicates resilience. As always, you can feel it in the silence.