If Swift’s previous recordings were full-blown productions with radically distinct aesthetics, this one would be best staged in a black-box theater, where the stories change but the physical space remains consistently austere. The effect is most curious on “Maroon,” which opens in medias res on the aftermath of a night fueled by some roommate’s “cheap-ass screw-top rosé,” a syllabic feat. This doomed romance unwinds atop a downcast rumbling, with drums that echo as if from within a black hole; by the final chorus, Swift’s vocals are processed within an inch of their life. In stark contrast to the passionate hue of her words, the overall effect is oddly impersonal, bordering on numb. Of all of the songs on Midnights, “Maroon” may be the one that keeps me awake at night.
On 2020’s Folklore and Evermore, Swift stepped away from autobiographical songwriting and found new depths of feeling in fictional narratives. For perhaps the first time in a career built on curated lyrical bloodletting, she gave herself the gift of emotional distance. With Midnights, she returns to a diaristic style, addressing the central conflict of Taylor Swift, the individual and the persona: She’s self-conscious to a fault but rarely self-aware. “I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror,” she sings on lead single “Anti-Hero,” more weary than winking. She has fun with her self-loathing, likening herself to a performatively selfless politician and a Godzilla trampling a city of sexy babies; “It’s me, hi/I’m the problem,” she says at the bridge, cracking a wincing smile and imagining the memes to come. Owning the “problem” isn’t quite the same thing as changing, and she’s betting that you can relate.
Swift revisits this tension in the final minutes of Midnights, on “Mastermind”: “I swear/I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ’cause I care.” Movingly, she writes herself a twist ending: The lover whose attention she’s spent the entire song scheming to capture sees right through her designs. Swift has often portrayed love as something that happens to her; from “You Belong With Me” to “Don’t Blame Me,” she is forever at romance’s whims. But the “Mastermind” not only achieves what she wants and deserves through her own efforts, she finds someone who recognizes how important it is for her to assert creative agency. The sentiment is echoed again on “Sweet Nothing,” a hiccuping nursery rhyme written alongside her partner, actor Joe Alwyn (credited as William Bowery): “On the way home/I wrote a poem/You say, ‘What a mind’/This happens all the time.”
