Commentary by Devin McCue, Sumner Newscow — Happy Friday. If there’s one thing Taylor Swift loves, it’s her own lore.

Swift continually leaves clues for her fans (the Swifties) to find in videos and posts. She references lines from previous songs in follow-up tunes years later. Her new tour is even called “The Eras Tour,” so she can play her favorite songs all at one venue.

The woman loves a complicated, self-referential story.

Re-recording her albums over the last few years to get the rights back from notorious producer Scooter Braun (more on him later) has sent Taylor down a spiral of navel-gazing. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing either because it’s left us with her newest album, Midnights.

Midnights is the culmination of rerecording albums because it’s so similar to her previous work…for better or for worse. At times, this album feels like the badass older sister to 1989, but the low moments sound like her longtime producer, Jack Antnoff is simply out of ideas.

But, to get to the bottom of it, I’ll need to do what I’ve done for Taylor Swift’s last four albums, Reputation, Lover, Folklore, and Evermore: I’ll need to look at the record track by track.

Lavender Haze

On first listen, Lavender Haze sounds like the type of breathy synth-heavy pop track we’ve become all too familiar with from Jack Antonoff. But after a few times through, you’ll notice that despite the familiarity of the tune, there’s a distinct back beat that is all but forgotten elsewhere on Midnights.

That’s probably because the best producer on the album is on this song (and one other), and his name isn’t Jack or Swift. It’s Mark Spears, otherwise known as Sounwave. Sounwave is best known for his work with Kendrick Lamar on Good Kid M.A.A.D City, but this song alludes to a much later work of his on The Black Panther soundtrack.

Listen to All the Stars are Gold by Kendrick and SZA, followed by Lavender Haze back-to-back, and you’ll immediately hear the similarity.

Apart from the production, Lavender Haze shows off Taylor’s famous love of forgotten phrases and old-time slang. The titular haze is a 1950’s phrase for the blindness of being in love, and the color will start a recurring theme of hue references throughout the album.

Maroon

Now this is a bland song.

Taylor’s lyricism and use of extended metaphors are the only saving grace of this track, otherwise I could skip it every time. The idea repeated in the track are the same themes surrounding Swift’s most critically acclaimed album, Red. About a love that was fresh and new only to be trashed by the end. The song also holds one of my favorite color-inspired runs on the album:

The burgundy on my t-shirt

When you splashed your wine into me

And how the blood rushed into my cheeks

So scarlet, it was (Maroon)

Unfortunately, much like this song laments Taylor falling out of love with someone, it also represents my falling out of love with Jack Antonoff.

If you read my previous Taylor Swift album reviews, I had nothing but praise for Antonoff and his skills in pop music. But that was years ago, and he hasn’t seemed to move on from Reputation.

This verse pattern is his calling card: quick high hats with a synth over Taylor’s voice and inflection at the end of each line. It’s not bad, just played out. I really liked this pattern, but after four albums, it’s time to try something else.

Anti-Hero

Anti-hero is the lead single off Midnights, and it’s easy to see why. It’s the 1989 revival we were hoping for and more.

1989 was Taylor’s most popular album, hands down. While Red is lauded as her best songwriting (so far), there’s no denying how omnipresent 1989 was to popular culture in the mid-2010s. That’s where Blank Space, Shake it Off, Bad Blood, Out of the Woods, Wildest Dreams, and more came from.

One single, Welcome to New York, was so popular the city changed its motto.

Anti-Hero isn’t the most 1989-esque song on the album, but it gets the ball rolling. On top of shouting out her most popular album, this track also references the ever-present critique of Swift’s dating habits throughout her career: “maybe she’s the problem.”

That argument started as a semi-funny joke, then eventually snowballed into a “valid” criticism, and finally rested on an old punchline for the pop star to make fun of.

The entire theme of this song is Taylor admitting she’s had problems in her relationships from her side as well as the others. But now that she’s 30-something, who even cares anymore? Each chorus caps with the line “aren’t you tired rooting for the anti-hero?” as a tongue-in-cheek way of acknowledging everyone is still on her side.

Snow on the Beach (feat. Lana Del Rey)

Enough time has passed for me to say I don’t like Lana Del Rey’s music. Her wailing voice and repetitive lyricism isn’t deep enough for me to forgive the fact she dates a cop and refuses to change as much as Jack Antonoff.

All that being said, Snow on the Beach is a decent track with some of the better visual metaphors on the album. It also got everyone’s hopes up that Taylor Swift was going to write a song about doing cocaine with Lana Del Ray, which was fun while it lasted.

Unfortunately, much like Maroon, it’s a fine song with good lyricism, but it’s too repetitive without anything new to anchor it in my mind.

You’re on Your Own Kid

Track number five is a revered spot on any Taylor Swift album. It’s where she puts the song she believes has the best songwriting on the entire work, and she’s often correct. It’s where we’ve found The Archer, Delicate, All You Had to Do was Stay, Dear John, and the granddaddy of them all, All Too Well.

You’re on Your Own Kid is a worthy addition to that list because I’d argue it’s the most personal song on the album, rivaled only by Sweet Nothing later on.

It goes back to a staple Swift concept: pining. She remembers how she would desperately try to change herself to attract a person who only saw her as a friend. From that tired ground, Taylor builds a story that plots the changes she made in her career and personal life by shedding the cloak of innocence that kept her warm early in her career to the media storm and turbulent love life that awaited her.

All in all, it encompasses the theme of Midnights better than any other song. It’s a high-level review of Taylor’s career and personal life from her own perspective as an adult.

The other main theme of the track is Taylor’s struggle with body dysmorphia. The lines “searched the party of better bodies” and “I hosted parties and starved my body” show how much Taylor’s weight struggles with her.

While Taylor is conventionally attractive and thin, that doesn’t mean that she never struggled with her own body image, and that’s something that people took exception to. In the original cut of the music video for You’re on Your Own Kid, Taylor looked down at a scale only to read “fat.”

People took that as a dig at people heavier than her, even though I doubt that was ever the case. Taylor changed the music video, and if that was to make those upset by the scene feel better about their bodies, that’s okay. I hope she didn’t do it out of shame.

Midnight Rain

ALERT, Jack Antonoff tried something new ALERT.

Instead of a loud, pop ballad chorus, Midnight Rain is much more nuanced than other songs in Antonoff’s catalog. The song is otherwise sonically stunted, but I liked the experiment, and I’ll give credit where credit is due.

The song itself is likely about Taylor’s relationship with the actor Tom Hiddleston. They started dating early in Swift’s career when Tom was already established. The push and pull from people at different stages of life is an interesting topic for Taylor’s writing, and I thought she pulled it together nicely.

The song seems to let off that Taylor is still pining for Hiddleston in a way (which I completely understand just by looking at him), but her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn might not like it.

Question…?

This song is the most direct shoutout to 1989 on the record, and it isn’t close. It’s almost not even a shoutout because it sounds nearly identical to Welcome to New York.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that song too, but this is a bit much. It does make a little sense, however, to copy the old tune since the plot of the song looks back on the biggest transition in Taylor’s life: her move from Nashville to New York City.

That moment was huge for Taylor, not just because of the massive boom it had to her popularity and stardom. It also marked the change from pseudo-pop county to full-blown popstar. Red was her last album that had definitive country inspiration, then New York and 1989 saw her switch genres without ever looking back.

I haven’t delved too deep on the symbolism and inside-references to Taylor’s dating life other than the obvious, but Question is the target for most of the online “Gaylor” truthers. If you’re more interested in that form of review, I highly recommend Vox’s track by track breakdown.

Also, “Dickhead?” wash your mouth out missy.

Vigilante Sh*t

This is the corniest song Taylor Swift has ever written other than ME!

While Question references her 1989 album and You’re on Your Own Kid shouts out Red, Vigilante Sh*t is Taylor’s desperate attempt to capture the magic of her Reputation era. Since Reputation is my favorite Swift album, I’m sorry to report that she will likely never attain that level of badassery again.

The trouble starts with the opening line: “Draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man.” Yikes. That’s the kind of lyric you’d find on an Instagram post of a 15-year-old’s breakup selfie.

The rest of the song tells a brief fiction where Taylor plays the mistress to a powerful man only to sell his financial secrets to the FBI and his personal ones to his ex-wife. The story isn’t very interesting, and on top of that, it’s completely out of place in the song.

Vigilante Sh*t needed a two-minute interlude or a six-minute story time, and while I’m disappointed in the result, I think she was correct in choosing the under.

Bejeweled

As I’ve mentioned throughout this review, Midnights is at its best when it’s emulating 1989. Those moments of sugary pop beats with fun and pithy lyrics are when Swift is clearly having fun, and Bejeweled is one of those moments.

The balance of maturity and self-mocking that’s replete in the lyrics keeps Bejeweled from sounding too childish. She knows full well that the chorus is something straight out of a Teen Vogue magazine, but that’s why she uses it to make fun of her early days of singing songs like 22.

This song won’t win any writing awards, but I’ll wager it will be a fun single that makes the rounds this summer.

Labyrinth

Another song about her growth; this time reflecting on the times she thought she’d never get over her exes and stay trapped in the “labyrinth of her mind.”

I’m conflicted about Labyrinth because Midnights looks at Taylor’s entire career, which includes Folklore and Evermore, but I feel like they were too recent to be nostalgic for. Labyrinth sounds too much like Willow and I’m not aching to return to the bygone era of 2021.

Karma

Once again, Karma sounds better than most of this album simply by having more producers on it. The tempo isn’t much faster than any of the other tracks, but Karma simply thumps so much harder because unlike Jack, Sounwave and the other producers know how to use a drum machine.

I mentioned above that we’d return to the subject of Scooter Braun, Taylor’s old label owner. One of Swift’s under-mentioned skills is her ability to write a killer diss-track.

Karma is all about how bad Braun keeps failing now that Taylor is re-releasing her own albums. On top of taking those royalties away from Scooter, Taylor’s also dragged his name through the mud so hard, he’ll never sign another artist of her clout.

You only need to look at the second verse for the vicious intent in this otherwise poppy song:

Spiderboy, king of thieves

Weave your little webs of opacity

My pennies made your crown

Trick me once, trick me twice

Don’t you know that cash ain’t the only price?

It’s coming back around

Sweet Nothing

To wrap up Midnights, Taylor wrote two of her cutest songs for her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn. Joe is even credited as a co-writer on the track, but I think he’s a songwriter in the way kids are artists because Mom put their drawings on the fridge.

Sweet Nothing paints an adorable picture of the domestic life Taylor and Joe have built together. They have inside stories about a special rock they picked up in Ireland, Joe makes her dinner when Taylor’s stressed, and Taylor writes poems that Joe gives her way too much praise for.

It’s all very cozy and cute.

The song matches that flavor too. Instead of the big pop sound we’ve heard from the last song, Sweet Nothing is little more than an acoustic guitar with a surprise trumpet at points. Even though Taylor wants us to believe she’s still the woman from Vigilante Sh*t, this is who she truly is.

Mastermind

We’ll be stopping here, but the “3 a.m. Edition” of Midnights goes on for another 25 minutes of music if you’re so inclined. And let’s be honest, if you’ve made it all the way to the end of this, you’re definitely so inclined.

Mastermind is cute, if not a little immature. The intro and backdrop of the entire track sound like a video game, but it at least matches the content of the lyrics. The song is about how Taylor “manipulated” Joe to fall in love with her.

She plotted out their growth from friends and beyond and credits herself as the “mastermind” behind their love story. It seems very self-indulgent until the last verse, where it’s unveiled that Joe knew her master plan from the start and played along to appease her.

Like Sweet Nothing before it, this song is cozy and feels a lot closer to the real Taylor Swift than a lot of the music she’s released thus far. What a cap to an album.

Meme of the week

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