Midnights directly plays with the blurred boundary between fiction and reality in the way that it truly happens to us in our everyday lived reality, especially late at night when our own demons and night terrors trawl through our thoughts. I’ve talked a lot on this blog about how fiction and reality are not as directly distinct as we typically like to think about, and I think Midnights really paints how this works in particular times in our lives.

“It started with imagery,” she wrote about the album. “Visuals that popped into my mind and piqued my curiosity.” These images became characters who had voices. She tells the stories of these characters, in the hopes that they grow to be folklore, as the album’s name implores. “A tale that becomes folklore is one that is passed down and whispered around,” she wrote. But can music be folklore?