Taylor Swift at Midnight

So, Taylor Swift’s new album Midnights dropped. I don’t know why I don’t spend more time delving into music on this. With the exception of a Taylor Swift’s folklore and Orville Peck, I haven’t really spent much time talking about music. I don’t stay away intentionally, but if I’m going to hazard a guess it’s that I feel I have to say a lot more about music theory type stuff. But I don’t think you actually have to. There’s a lot surrounding music that helps us talk about stories and how stories impact us without needing to start talking about the way certain chords lead into other chords.

Maybe Midnights is the best place to return to music because we’ve already talked briefly about Swift when folklore dropped. I won’t lie - folklore really re-captured my attention when it came to Swift’s music. I think a lot of what I saw in folklore has continued in Midnights, so let’s talk about it.

In folklore, Swift talked openly about how the album was comprised of songs about fictional characters. There were three stories on the album, each song either from a different person’s perspective or at a different time period for a story. After a few listens, it was easy to string the connected songs together. Swift has tried to say she writes about fictional people before, trying to pretend that Blank Space was about a fictional character, but I think that song had a lot more to do with Swift than she would probably care to admit. Her album folklore really helped to demonstrate that she could do fiction, but despite her open discussion and the clear depiction of the fictional stories she was painting, people still tried to find hints of Swift’s true experience somewhere within.

But we needn’t of bothered. Because Midnights is exactly what we were wanting.

Midnights does the perfect combination of fictional and personal stories, all mixed together and blurry. The joint theme of the album are all songs written quite late at night, during sleepless nights. The production on the album (I know I said I wasn’t going to get into music stuff, but bare with me) is that kind of strange techno-lo-fi type music people tend to put on while reading or studying or trying to focus in general. It has a kind of floating feel to it, and it seems the perfect music to put on late at night when you can’t sleep but am trying desperately to try and shut up your anxious brain.

When first announcing the album, Swift said that it was the “stories of thirteen sleepless nights throughout my life”. More than that it was the “collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams”. The reference to dreams, whether they be nice dreams or terrible dreams, is a nice way to fit into the lyrics of the album, which touch on aspects of life with vivid depictions that slip into the world of dreams. In “You’re On Your Own, Kid”, Swift writes that “I looked around in a blood-soaked gown / And I saw something they can’t take away”, for example.

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. There are definitely parts of these songs that we could pull out and talk about in relation to Swift directly and her life, especially the song “Karma” which is entirely about her cats while also simultaneously touching on her past song “Look What You Made Me Do”. She talks openly about her relationship, in the way Swift has always done in the past.

Her shifting with the fiction from the way Swift has been known to talk about her self has only helped to solidify the way her music mythologises both herself and her life. In the past, the storytelling of her life helped others to connect the stories to their own lives and experiences, but now it extends to the question of which version of the Swift story you want to listen to as the “valid” one for you. In other words, she has her own different variations in the way that myths have different variations, all because it’s based on which elements you consider to be fictional and dreams vs those that connect directly. But things are not always that clear cut of what fits into one section, because the dreams Swift discusses are just as real as other elements of her life through her own experience. She blurs the worlds on purpose in order to demonstrate how we are made up of all these different parts of ourselves, regardless of which ones are considered “real” by those outside of ourselves.