From wildest dreams to darkest dreams

Taylor Swift drops her 10th studio album, Midnights

Taylor Swift, the queen of songwriting and the master of all masterminds, drops her 10th studio album, Midnights, at midnight. Swift first mentioned the album in her statement at the 2022 MTV Music Video Awards, where she won Video of the Year, the platform’s highest honor, on August 29, 2022. She released her tracklist titles over the last two months in a TikTok series entitled “Midnights Mayhem with Me”. In just three years, Taylor has released six albums! The singer-songwriter debuted "Lover" in 2019, followed by Folklore and evermore in 2020, Fearless and RED Taylor’s Version in 2021, and "Midnights" in 2022. If there’s one person who stays up all night until midnight to shower us with brand-new albums, it’s definitely Swift!

The synth-pop visual album graces with influence from past pop albums such as 1989, Reputation, and Lover, where Taylor Swift worked with producer Jack Antonoff. This album marked the 8th Antonoff-Swift collaboration in a Swift masterpiece, including two re-recordings. Midnights, the stories of 13 sleepless nights, is inspired by the five things that kept Swift up at night. The first thing that kept Swift up at night was self-loathing, the feeling of not being enough that makes you hate yourself to the core.

The second is fantasizing about revenge. Who doesn’t like good revenge? After years of being in the bad light through numerous controversies, Swift is undoubtedly planning for something better than revenge. Third is wondering about what might have been; what should’ve been if things did not go the way they went. Fourth is falling in love. In the six years of her relationship with Actor Joe Alwyn, Swift took some inspiration from how they fell in love. Lastly, falling apart; when the clock strikes midnight, Swift begins to break into pieces.

The album opener goes deep into how Swift is smitten by her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, referencing the slang term coined in the ‘50s, Lavender Haze, which means being in love. The lyrics “They’re bringing up my history, but you weren’t even listening,” tells us how Alwyn refuses to recognize the people’s perception of Swift regarding the songwriter’s dating history, something that people have their eyes on the longest time. The album’s second track, Maroon, kicks off with a strong beat. While Red describes a love that’s burning red, Maroon depicts the tale of a love that has grown old, painted in the shades of maroon. A remarkable lyric from the song is “the lips I used to call home”, which tells us how one moment, a person can be our all, and the next, they’re the root of our downfall.

Taylor seemingly faces every inner demon in Anti-Hero, the third track in Midnight. This song accounts for one’s worst fears and deepest secrets, a list of gruesome insecurities that consume us. According to Swift, this song is inspired by the thought that life has become so much to handle that we no longer feel like humans. Taylor claims that despite the song’s bluntness, she likes it a lot because of how honest it is. We all have pieces of ourselves that we despise, and if we want to be this person, we must accept the positive and negative sides of who we are. The fourth track, called Snow On The Beach, features another pop legend, Lana del Rey, the mastermind of hits such as Summertime Sadness, Brooklyn Baby, and many more. As described by Swift, the song is about "falling in love with someone at the same time they are falling in love with you." Just like how the snow falls on the beach, it is the kind of love that is surreal and makes you feel like you are flying in a dream.

"You’re On Your Own Kid," the fifth track of the album, reveals the singer-songwriter’s candid and personal lyrics on her own path exploring fame, love, and relationships she has both ended up losing and gaining. Midnight Rain, the sixth track, reveals the story of a long-lost love. The song illustrates a different chapter in her love life, one in which she is not the wounded hopeless romantic. Instead, she is the one breaking hearts by prioritizing her career over their relationship. The question is, who’s the mystery guy? “Question...?” is the 7th track of the album. Pop in its entirety, the song delivered a story of a girl asking a sad boy in a crowded party atmosphere the question, “Did you ever have someone kiss you in a crowded room?” Vigilante Sh*t, the eighth track off of Midnights, advises us not to get sad but to get even. It follows a woman seeking revenge on her lover after a presumed break-up. The song’s themes can be paralleled to Swift’s “no body, no crime,” a track from her 9th album, evermore.

“When I walk in the room, I can still make the whole place shimmer.” The ninth track of Midnights, Bejeweled, narrates the frustration of a woman whose lover does not value her the way she should be valued. As revenge, she goes out for a night to prove that she can make any place she goes dazzled as she polishes up lovely. Each of us is terrified of something; however, Labyrinth, the album’s tenth song, explores one’s fear of falling in love. Swift connected her dread of elevators to her fear of love, comparing the two to a plane falling and the feeling that you won’t ever recover. Love is complicated, but if you never give it a try, how will you ever know?

Despite fans theorizing that Swift has a lost album called “Karma,” she releases it in the form of her tenth album’s eleventh track. The song is about Swift reminding a supposed ex-partner how karma is kismet. The word “karma” is repeated several times in the song in different ways to show how karma can come back to him differently. The second to the last track of the album, Sweet Nothing, marked the 6th collaboration of the couple Swift-Alwyn under Alwyn’s pseudonym William Bowery. In the song, the singer mourns how she fell from the deceit of a love that seems sweet from the outside but contains nothing on the inside. Mastermind reveals a truth none of us was expecting: was Taylor and Joe’s romance preplanned from the beginning? The album’s thirteenth track tells us a story of a relationship that wasn’t forced but planned. It’s all revealed in the song’s lyrics, “What if I told you I’m a mastermind?

And now you’re mine, it was all by design, ‘cause I’m a mastermind.”

With every surprise she pulls, Taylor Swift never ceases to amaze us. Fans haven’t recovered from the first 13 tracks, and there are another 7 to cry their hearts out to at 3 am! Three hours after Midnights was released, the singer launched seven additional songs to the collection, which she calls the “3 am tracks” or The Vault tracks. These songs are titled “The Great War,” “Bigger Than The Whole,” “Paris,” “High Infidelity,” “Glitch,” “Would've, Could've, Should've,” and “Dear Reader.” Unlike her previous albums, which are centered on the concept of love, Midnights touches the souls of many because not only does it talk about love but also the deepest and darkest secrets one could have. Even though the album was leaked, many fans stood up for Swift’s privacy.

And now, just hours after its release, Midnights is at the top of the charts in more than 70 countries

worldwide! Are you ready to explore your midnights with Midnights?