Taylor Swift’s tenth album Midnights, out last night, starts with a bit of a fakeout: a pretty straightforward hip-hop inflected song called “Lavender Haze,” where she describes feelings of depression and her frustration with being hounded about when she is going to get married. The song was co-written by Zoe Kravitz and her longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn (under the William Bowery pen name he debuted on 2020’s Folklore), who both know quite a bit about public relationship scrutiny.
This mode of lyrical self-exegesis is sometimes Swift at her best. But it can fall flat when it feels like a straightforward list of things she’s experienced without the right artistic transformation that makes a feeling into a pop song. In one sense, “Lavender Haze” is a little reminiscent of 2017’s Reputation—you know, the snake one—in its fame-based complaints and then-trendy musical austerity, but by foregrounding her own internal turmoil, it also shows exactly how much she’s grown personally and artistically over the last five years. “Lavender Haze” is a standout track, but from there, Swift doesn’t just revisit old ground, she finds a new way to present the refinement of her songwriting craft. Midnights is full of the same wordplay and emotional highs as her pop breakthrough albums, but it is pared back and self-assured in a way that shows just how much these songs are coming from her artistry, not her life.
By “Anti-Hero,” the album’s third song and first single, she’s not just hinting at that analytical ability, she’s turned it into an anthem. The indelible first two lines, “I have this thing where I get older and just never wiser / midnights become my afternoons,” are sly commentary on the criticism she occasionally receives about being a little stuck in youthful themes and also the kind of thought that fixates someone with anxiety. But isn’t growing up understanding that at your core, you’re really doing it all to yourself? By making her self-doubt so theatrical, she’s embracing herself as a character in a way that reflects her hard-fought wisdom.
Though the musical experimentation on Folklore and its companion Evermore were the most attention-grabbing, she had a real breakthrough in using songs as vehicles for fictional storytelling, which expanded her emotional palette. From Rebecca Harkness’s Gilded Age fantasia in “Last Great American Dynasty” to “Cardigan,” “August,” and “Betty,” a song cycle about young love gained and lost. Now she’s turning a similar eye to more adult and subdued topics to great effect. “Vigilante Shit” sounds the closest to a James Bond theme she’s ever done, and “Snow on the Beach,” her duet with Lana Del Rey, finds her trying on a yearning, winsome narrator more akin to Del Rey.
In an Instagram post, Swift said that she and Jack Antonoff worked on this album together, over late nights, while their partners were filming a movie in Panama. (Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon, featuring Alwyn and Antonoff’s fiancée Margaret Qualley, premiered at Cannes to some disappointment in May.) Swift noted that this is the first time she had ever had Antonoff as her main collaborator from start to finish, and the album really shows off how well they gel. As always, Swift’s songs get an energy boost from Antonoff’s glissandos and synth noises, which means she can dwell a bit longer in emotional subtlety, yet the universal quality of Swift’s songwriting seems to always focus the hijinks that define his mood-making work elsewhere.
There’s a tendency among Swiftologists to reduce this all to numbers and rankings in a way akin to sports fandom. I’m as guilty of that as anyone, but Midnights is a reminder that there’s also something so much bigger than that, especially in a few striking moments where she mentions body image. On “You’re On Your Own Kid,” she mentions “searching the party of better bodies” and “I hosted parties and starved my body / Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss.” There’s the subtext of the funny but sad line in “Anti-Hero” where she says, “Everyone’s a sexy baby and I’m the monster in the hills,” made manifest in the song’s music video, where she stands on a scale that says “Fat” soon after delivering it.
In the 2020 documentary Miss Americana, she spoke about times in the past when she had an acute eating disorder. But now, after the fact, she can turn that lingering feeling into something that feels like reaching out to her listener for some commiseration. For Swift, the songwriting seems like the part of this she’s compelled to do. The direct communication that results seems almost second nature to her, like it’s not even a part of the work. Every time she does it, it only increases the excitement for her to do it again.