JOIN USTaylor Swift caught between past and future on ‘Midnights’
Taylor Swift has always been at her best when writing about herself — she is a ruthless excavator of her own internal tugs of war. But she also thrives when writing about Taylor Swift — the idea, the metanarrative, the character.
Midnights, her 10th studio album, is, thus, in places a careful recitation of raw love, in others, a flashback to past romantic indignities, but most pointedly and effectively a commentary on what it feels like to live as a deeply observed figure, constantly narrativised by others.
“Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism, like some kind of congressman?” she muses on Anti-Hero, one of the album’s high points.
On Mastermind, the album’s sparkly closer, she paints her villain origin story, if you’re inclined to see her as a villain. It goes: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid/So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since/To make them love me and make it seem effortless.”
Into each pop star’s life, some outside perspective must intrude. But there are limitations to this approach, and Taylor has hit a junction all superstars eventually arrive at — whether to continue to reckon with the past or to forge forward boldly into the future.
After a handful of albums that felt like pivots ranging from soft to hard — bonkers pop on ‘1989’; edgy experimentation on Reputation; pandemic-isolation character studies on Folklore’ and Evermore’— Midnights feels like a concession to an older, safer idea of Taylor, full of songs that are capable and comfortable but often insufficient.
Sometimes, those old modes serve her well. On Karma, a largely dim song with an aggressively plastic sound, there’s a twinkle in her voice toward the end when she exhales, “Karma’s a relaxing thought/Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?” On the woozy ‘Question…?’ she’s equally tart: “What’s that that I heard, that you’re still with her?/That’s nice, I’m sure that’s what’s suitable.”
But some lyrics can be lacklustre and bluntly imagistic, with little of the detail that made Taylor one of the signature pop songwriters of the 21st century. “Don’t put me in the basement/When I want the penthouse of your heart,” she sings on the metallic and tense Bejeweled.
You’re On Your Own, Kid and Maroon constrains her voice. Only on Sweet Nothing, a playground lullaby she wrote with her long-time romantic partner Joe Alwyn, does she approach her signature wide-eyed vulnerability.
The album’s high point is Vigilante, a slinky, moody electro-cabaret exhale about an antagonist that teems with narrative verve: “Draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man/You did some bad things but I’m the worst of them.” Here, Taylor is leaning into the character version of herself — it’s funny, wry, slightly perturbing. It is Taylor at her self-referential apex.