A Thematic Exploration of “Midnights”

Before the release of my personal most-anticipated re-record, Speak Now Taylor’s Version, I wrote a post analyzing the themes of the album as a way to speculate on and look forward to all the ways that the re-record might iterate upon and build on the story the original album told. I think of that post as a real success story as far as my “fathoming themes” skills is concerned, as I zeroed in on the naivete and whimsical fantasy captured by vault songs like “Foolish One” and “Timeless,” before I even heard them.

I’d like to try something a little similar today, but for the opposite reason. Unlike with Speak Now, where I was anticipating the themes of a new take, I want to take a look back at the themes of Taylor’s tenth studio album, Midnights.

If you’re clued in on the current Taylor Swift news, you might know that the Midnights era has now officially ended with the announcement of her eleventh album, The Tortured Poets Department, meaning that we have now, supposedly, gotten everything there is to get from the Midnights era.

First announced at the Video Music Awards in 2022, Midnights was an absolute shock to everyone, including myself, who had assumed that Taylor was going to be spending the next few years solely focused on her re-recording project. Off the heels of critical darlings folklore and evermore, it had a lot of hope and speculation riding on it, especially from the legion of new fans who become Swifties thanks to these two albums.

In what I could only call defiance of these expectations, though, Taylor was ruthlessly tight-lipped about basically any details on what the album would sound like. We knew from the cover and associated merchandise that it had a dark, 70s-inspired aesthetic, but we knew nothing about the sound. Taylor drip-fed us song titles through her absolutely feral “Midnights Mayhem with Me” TikToks, released at midnight on a somewhat obscure schedule. Each TikTok featured her randomly drawing bingo balls to choose which song titles she would announce.

We did know about the themes of the album, though. Taylor stated that it was an exploration of 13 sleepless nights throughout her life, causing many to speculate that we’d be flashing back to previous heartbreaks and situations from prior albums, no doubt inspired by the process of going back and re-recording the music exploring these very situations. Still, it wasn’t really enough to clue us in on what this actually meant for the way the album would sound.

Then, came release week. We knew that the lead single would be “Anti-Hero,” and that we would be getting a music video. We also knew about a “chaotic 3 a.m. surprise” three hours after the album’s release. Still, we hadn’t heard a single note.

And then, the album arrived.

I chose to listen to Midnights with my partner in our living room, clutching a glass of wine. My shocked reaction to those opening notes of “Lavender Haze” were, I think, echoed by a majority of the fanbase. I think based on the aesthetic of the album and the previous sounds of folklore and evermore, a solid portion of Swifties had assumed the album would be more acoustic, perhaps inspired by 70s psychedelia or rock. What we got instead was a return to Taylor’s home base, with an unabashedly and unashamedly pop album produced entirely by Jack Antonoff.

Let me be totally up front with you – I loved Midnights from the moment I first heard it. It was pop, yes, but it totally showed the DNA it had received from Taylor’s foray into folk and indie in the previous two albums. And what I loved even more was the way the lyrics immediately resonated with me and resounded with me on multiple levels. It showed its references to her previous work blatantly and explicitly in a way that I grabbed on my very first listen.

Of course, the red imagery of “Maroon” called back to the relationship that inspired Red. Of course “The jokes weren’t funny / I took the money / My friends from home don’t know what to say / I looked around in a blood-soaked gown / And saw something they can’t take away” from “You’re On Your Own, Kid” was a reference to the reputation era and the public mockery and derision she rose from. Of course I recognized the sample of “Out of the Woods” at the beginning of “Question…?”, situating that song squarely in the 1989 era.

But the emotions were also so blatant and explicit. I was moved to tears on my very first listen of “Sweet Nothing.” The feel of the album, tired and bleary and overwhelmed by the weight of every past heartbreak and sadness, was so potent. This album dominated my listening time for the next couple of weeks. I was so transported into its world.

Over a year later, I want to go back and explore why this album had such a chokehold on my mind. I want to explore these potent themes and emotions a bit closer. 

A brief note on real-life inspirations: As I’ve discussed in a few previous posts, I have mixed feelings about analyzing Taylor Swift songs in an attempt to sleuth out information about her current or former relationships that aren’t, let’s say, in the text explicitly. There are some who, in light of her breakup with Joe Alwyn, who she was dating at the time of this album’s release, have decided that the album was actually secretly a breakup album this whole time. While I can see this interpretation in some ways, I don’t believe this was the ultimate intention of the album, and speculating on what these songs might say about the end of Taylor’s relationship to Joe starts to approach my personal line in the sand when it comes to speculating on Taylor’s life.

However, I do believe that this album makes frequent and intentional references to, let’s call it “Taylor Lore”, that is, information from previous eras and songs and albums that is pretty well-known amongst fans, enough that referencing it in a song obviously calls to mind the specific scenarios those albums and songs and eras explored. In these cases, I think discussing real-life inspiration is fair game, only because Taylor herself is making intentional reference to details she knows we know about her life. This is what I will call “explicit reference” in the text, and therefore feels valid to me as I interpret these songs. Midnights is so rife with these references to the past that I feel like I’d be doing it a disservice if I completely ignored these details in my thematic analysis.

This is not an exact science, and so I will not say that I am morally perfect when it comes to the delicate balance of boundaries in Taylor Swift’s art. I hope you’ll enjoy anyway.

Lavender Haze

Coming in on a thrumming dance beat, “Lavender Haze”’s deep bass and distant instrumentals create a sonic landscape that feels disconnected from the world, like a room closed and locked to a boisterous dance party next door.

This sound is absolutely meaningful to the song’s lyrics, which discuss an intimate relationship romanticized for all of the ways it is private. But as the song makes you feel like you’re in a room locked away from all of the noise, its lyrics describe a giddy joy and freedom found in a relationship that gets to exist out of the public eye.

To me, this song feels inspired by the success Taylor found establishing her longest-lasting relationship almost entirely away from the public’s eye. This is something that came up repeatedly on reputation in songs like “Dancing With Our Hands Tied” and will reoccur in this album as well.

However, I’d like to broaden this idea as well. Though this song definitely focuses heavily on the effects of public scrutiny on her relationship, Taylor does a lot of exploration of scrutiny and the public eye throughout this album.

There is also a certain naïve escapism inherent to this song. The term “Lavender Haze” is a slang term apparently made up by the show “Mad Men” to describe a phenomenon I’ve more commonly seen referred to as the honeymoon phase, a time early in a relationship where the only thing the people involved care about is each other, and passion is intense and obsessive. The other strong associations with this phase, to my mind, is its temporary nature – people just don’t build lasting relationships on these kinds of feelings forever. Instead, it’s when the relationship settles into a comfortable and productive normalcy that relationships grow strong.

So it feels thematically interesting that Taylor wishes for her relationship to stay in these bubbly, naïve early stages, hidden away from others. Especially as an opening statement – and especially considering the further exploration of relationships in her past to come.

Although I just said I don’t feel like this album was a secret breakup album, I do think the fact that Taylor was obviously going through some sort of relationship trouble with Joe at the time of this album’s creation is relevant – as is the number of times conflict in their relationship will come up on this album and has come up in previous albums (see: “Afterglow”).

Maroon

Relevant to our attempts to place this track somewhere in Taylor’s career and life is the titular color – a darker red. Even before we heard this song, people were already speculating that this song would discuss Taylor’s first great heartbreak, the one that inspired her one and only true heartbreak album, Red. Absolutely confirming it is the New York setting and the huge amount of red imagery in this song – spilled wine, blood, rust, lipstick. This was a major motif on Red as well, as Taylor used to color to explore how her wild love and wilder heartbreak felt to her in the moment.

Now, though, the red has faded to a darker color, a maroon, reflecting how this song is very much situated looking backward. In stark contrast to the opening track and its vehement wish to stay in the early, happy stages of a relationship, “Maroon” jumps to the total opposite end of a relationship – to a narrator reflecting back on what caused a relationship to end.

When I first heard this song, I thought it was a reflection on this era, timely as it came right after Taylor finished rerecording Red. But now I feel like the song’s themes resonate strongly with the rest of the album. Particularly, it reflects a certain search for meaning in the end of something.

My favorite part of the song is the bridge, where Taylor sings “ And I wake with your memory over me / That’s a real fucking legacy, to leave.” The intentional pause between “a real fucking legacy” and “to leave” has always felt poignant for me, like it’s meant to mean two things. On one hand, it’s the legacy this relationship has left with her both emotionally and professionally (particularly in the way public interest in her relationship to Jake Gyllenhaal colored the conversation around Red Taylor’s Version), but it’s also telling us what that legacy is. His legacy was to leave.

So, for all that, I can’t help but feel that this song is exploring how such pain has come to create meaning in her present life, and how that pain has faded in the present. Memory is another thing we’ll explore quite a bit in this album. But I’ll point out again the interesting dichotomy between this pervasive theme and the last song’s pervasive theme – situated right next to each other. The naivete of wanting to stay hidden away and happy versus the painful understanding of what the entirety of a relationship long gone means to your life. Interesting, is all I’ll say.

Anti-Hero

Time for another big theme to appear, although I think this is a theme inherent to most of Taylor’s recent work – painful self-understanding. “Anti-Hero” is tongue-in-cheek, sure, but it’s also deeply dark and depressed, with that same big echoed production mimicking the bleary self-hatred Taylor is engaging in as she takes jabs at herself.

This song also introduces explicitly the concept of Midnights, sitting around being haunted by the ghosts of your past. Why Taylor is wrestling with these ghosts is not fully clear, but at the time we assumed it came from the process of rerecording her old work, like doing so had reawakened some of these feelings she felt when she initially recorded these albums.

While I still do think that’s the case, I think there’s more to it than that – I feel like this album is trying to use these memories to understand your current self. In this case, it’s in a negative way – reflecting on your worst mistakes and bad habits and ruminating on how they continue to hurt you.

Snow On The Beach

Again in a pretty big emotional shift, we move from the self-hatred of “Anti-Hero” into this dreamy love song. We have a title that introduces a concept and a setting – the seemingly contradictory image of snow falling on a beach. Taylor uses the incongruity of this image to explore the almost miracle-like feeling of falling in love with someone at the right place and the right time.

The impossibility of this situation is the real focus of it, and the way Taylor can’t seem to believe that such a thing could even happen. It actually kind of slides nicely in with the themes introduced in “Lavender Haze” – of a soft romanticism, though in this case there’s a bit more incredulity that such a relationship can work out.

What sucks is, at the time, most listeners felt like this incredulity was at something that would work out, despite how miraculous it seems. But now…

This is why I balk at calling Midnights a breakup album, though, because I really do think the intention of the song isn’t to be dark. We can’t let ourselves get distracted by what actually happened in real life and ignore what’s here in the song. The central symbol, snow on the beach, is a strange phenomenon that wouldn’t seem possible, but is. In the same way, I think we’re meant to believe that the love in this song is the same – feeling impossible, but all too real and beautiful.

If we think of this song as one of the memories Taylor is exploring, to me it’s an unabashedly positive one – one that proves to her that beautiful things can happen, even if they seem rare.

You’re On Your Own, Kid

For quite a few albums now, Taylor has stuck with a tradition of placing her most emotionally heavy track at the Track 5 slot. I think “You’re On Your Own, Kid” is maybe one of her heaviest. A sprawling narrative tracing her entire career, from humble beginnings crushing on a boy who will never notice her, to her struggle to be noticed in Nashville’s country music scene, to the whirlwind of fame and attention – both positive and negative – all the way up to present.

All along is the refrain – “You’re on your own, kid / You always have been.” At first glance, this is a sad statement, a lonely one. It might seem to return to those themes of self-hatred introduced in “Anti-Hero.” But even as Taylor explores the ways fame took her dignity, her health, and many of her friends and family, the music picks up and it starts to take on a note of strength. Like, I went through all of this and I’ve come out the other end. I did it all on my own, I can keep going.

I also find it extremely relevant to mention that this is the song that originated the line “make the friendship bracelets,” which became an Eras Tour staple as Swifties made and exchanged friendship bracelets at every tour stop. Even as the song is about having to rely on yourself through everything, through better or worse, there’s an acknowledgement that, while you can only ever rely on yourself, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to reach out for support from others – even fully knowing that friendships aren’t always forever.

This song is so fascinating, because while all the other songs in this album tend to focus on a singular time and place in Taylor’s life, it is so much more broad. I can’t help but feel like it plays a similar role to “Anti-Hero,” then, but as its sort of narrative foil. While “Anti-Hero” focuses on how memory brings Taylor down and causes her to ruminate on her flaws, “You’re On Your Own, Kid” focuses on how memory of past triumph shores her resolve and gives her the will to keep going, even when things are painful.

Midnight Rain

Remember when I mentioned how the pressures of fame are going to come up again? I mean, of course they will, it’s Taylor Swift, but I also think it’s a pretty major theme of this album in particular. Whereas “Lavender Haze” focused on how a relationship thrives away from the spotlight, “Midnight Rain” tells the story of how the spotlight drove apart a relationship.

The inhuman, vocoded vocals on the chorus versus Taylor’s natural voice on the verses create a dichotomy that mirrors the themes of the song – Taylor choosing her career and all the fame and attention it begins over a humbler life at the side of a as of now unknown past lover. (Fans are divided. Who it is doesn’t matter much to my analysis, though.)

Important to this dichotomy too are the images Taylor uses to characterize her lover and his life – images of home and family, and the role of a wife versus a celebrity. Though Taylor never seems to think she made the wrong decision in rejecting this life, it’s notable how she ruminates on it in this song, and how she comes to characterize it in the bridge that ends it.

She sings “He never thinks of me except when I’m on TV… and I never think of him except on midnights like this.” Look at that, it’s our home concept of being haunted by memories, again. Just like on “Maroon,” Taylor wonders about how a relationship that is over now continues to resonate and have meaning to who she is now – in this case, seemingly making her think about the decisions she has made to lead her to what is pretty inarguably the highest heights her career has ever reached.

While she doesn’t seem to regret finding herself there, she still can’t help but think of what might have happened had she not made those same decisions, and what kind of life she might have led.

Question…?

Continuing on this idea of “what could have been” comes “Question…?”, a song I think still puzzles Swifties to this day. One thing is clear, at least to me, and that’s that this song is harkening back to the 1989 era with the way it explicitly opens with a sample of “Out of the Woods,” a song from that album.

“Out of the Woods,” interestingly enough, is also a song about memory and reflection within a relationship, though definitely situates itself in the drama of wondering if your current relationship has finally passed through all of the obstacles and reached a place of stability and health. This song comes in, though, to state that it didn’t, because this song takes the perspective of someone passive-aggressively asking pointed questions of an ex.

Though it’s not clear what exactly went down, what feels true to me is that the ex in question didn’t put in enough effort to keep the relationship alive when he should have. Another pretty major theme within the song is miscommunication, as Taylor highlights conversations where people talk around each other – “fuckin’ politics and gender roles and you’re not sure and I don’t know” – something quite opposite to the way Taylor seems to want to push back all of that and ask some pointed questions about why exactly her ex fumbled the ball on their time together.

So, in a bit of a sillier way, it comes to have a similar theme of missed chances as the previous song, though from the opposing perspective.

Vigilante Shit

Okay, we’ve talked about sad things too much. It’s time to get sexy.

Okay, sorry, I’m joking. But “Vigilante Shit” is a bit of an outlier in some ways. It definitely reflects Taylor’s perspective on the rerecording situation. Quite different than “my tears ricochet,” the anger and sadness at having the first six albums of her work stolen from her has become something more confident as Taylor seems to come out of a spy thriller with the upper hand.

Taylor knows she’s won in this track – she characterizes Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta as the criminals caught red-handed. But I will say, it sets up the continuing pattern we’ve witnessed several times on this album, where a situation is set up and the next song twists the narrative.

Bejeweled

So yeah, I’m about to argue that “Bejeweled” iterates on the memory of Taylor’s albums being taken from her.

While yes, the actual narrative of the song is about Taylor stepping out again and being admired by the public after time away, calling to mind several situations in her life (the release of reputation after her year of hiding, and yes, the way she’s spoken so far about ending her relationship with Joe, a relationship characterized by hiding away from the public). But I also think there’s a definite comment on her own career here.

In particular, I want to draw your attention the line “Have you heard? I can reclaim the land.” To me this can mean nothing else but her rerecordings and the attention doing them has brought her from the public at large. With that, we can extrapolate to the rest of the song – arguably, Taylor’s career was at a bit of a lower point after Lover, and I sometimes wonder if she was considering throwing in the towel or at least taking a bit of a break until the pandemic changed her priorities.

Once folklore and evermore and the rerecordings reignited interest in her and her work, though, she was able to step out once again and be the center of attention – and unlike before, when this attention was negative for her, she finds herself enjoying it again. I also wonder if this could be a bit of a comment on her return to pop in this album.

Let me also point out the return to the theme of public attention, adding yet another twist onto the competing ideas in “Lavender Haze” and “Midnight Rain”, where the attention is bringing her back to her old self again and filling her with strength.

Labyrinth

This totally underrated track feels thematically similar to “You’re On Your Own, Kid”, to me. A minimal, echoed thrum of instrumentals provides the simple soundtrack to high, thin vocals as Taylor reflects on a time of horrible heartbreak and how a new love came along to make her believe in love again.

You’ll find yourself seeing a lot of repetition here of themes we’ve already discussed. That interplay of positive and negative, the way memory can color your present, as Taylor seems to characterize her current love by how it breaks the expectations she gained from the total failure of the previous one.

The title is interesting to me, too. It’s not a refrain, but just one line – “lost in the labyrinth of my mind.” Again, we come to this internal place, situated in Taylor’s mind as she sorts through images of the past and tries to make sense of what it means for her present. The twists and turns echo the ways we’ve seen this album introduce a theme in one song and then look at it in a totally different way in another, to me, mirroring the way this album as a whole explores how our previous experiences play many roles in making us who we are and coloring how we feel in the present.

Karma

And what’s a concept all about things in your past coming to affect things in your present? Why, Karma, of course!

If you’re not up to date with your Swiftie lore, let me tell you that the title of this track has a lot of meaning you may not realize. See, after Taylor released 1989 in 2014, she was at the height of her popularity, having successfully completed her transition to pop, netting her tons of new fans and acclaim. But as this era was winding down, Taylor got into probably some of the biggest hot water of her career when the Kim and Kanye situation happened. This is a long enough post already so I won’t get too into the weeds, but essentially public opinion on Taylor dipped and she realized that it wasn’t healthy for her to remain in the spotlight, so she disappeared from the public eye for about a year before returning with her comeback, reputation, in 2017.

In the interim, fans speculated that she had been working on a follow-up album to 1989 that had to be scrapped in the wake of the Kimye controversy. Fans pointed out Taylor’s pretty big aesthetic shift, bleaching her hair and taking on a very particularly summery aesthetic with the things she posted on Instagram, a move that some thought was her gearing up for a new era.

This supposedly scrapped album came to be known as “Karma” after a particular scene in the music video of “The Man” featured the main obnoxious dude character peeing on a subway wall featuring all of the names of Taylor’s stolen albums and the word “Karma”, which fans felt was her signaling that there had been this secret interim work with that name that had also been taken from her as well.

In reality, there likely never was a “Karma” album. Taylor stated in several interviews post-1989 and pre-controversy that she was taking a writing break, and even if she had written some songs for her next album in that time, there’s no reason to believe that it had progressed to the point of becoming a scrapped album – it’s more likely she just would have kept those songs for another, later album. It’s not uncommon for songwriters as prolific as Taylor to have a back catalogue.

So it was very tongue-in-cheek for Taylor to name a song “Karma”. Especially when that song seems to be about that very controversy, among others, that Taylor has been able to bounce back from over her career. And it also does neatly align with many of the themes I’ve discussed here, including looking back on your past to define your current strength.

Sweet Nothing

The song that made me cry when I first heard it. “Sweet Nothing” provides an interesting conclusion to the number of songs commenting on Taylor’s fame and the way it relates to her relationships and her sense of self (at least as far as the standard edition of Midnights is concerned.)

In many ways, this is a similar story to the one told in “Lavender Haze.” Overwhelmed by the crushing weight of outside expectation and attention on her life, Taylor romanticizes her private, intimate moments with her lover. With a clever little twist on the phrase “whispering sweet nothings” to describe the sometimes indecipherable words whispered from one lover to another, Taylor compares the way her lover expects nothing of her, providing comfort and encouragement.

There’s a lot of memory contained in this song, too, with the verses focusing in on little moments of intimacy between Taylor and her love, including my favorite:

“On the way home, I wrote a poem / You say ‘What a mind.’ / This happens all the time.”

I point this out because this is a moment of Taylor showing off her skill with writing that has defined her career as a singer/songwriter. But, in stark contrast to the huge amount of attention this skill normally nets her from the outside world, there’s an interesting dichotomy with the simple and gentle praise she receives for it.

Mastermind

In the final track of the standard edition, we witness a lot of the themes of the rest of the album collide. This is another personal favorite of mine, both personally and as a Swiftie. It’s a song that seems to call metatextually to Taylor’s own career tendencies, cheekily hinting at future projects and planning things out years in advance and her personal feeling that she tends to carefully plan every move she makes in her personal relationships as well.

This is presented almost as an admission of guilt and a point of pride simultaneously, slotting quite nicely into the overall pattern throughout this album of situations considered for both their benefits and their drawbacks.

But I also can’t help but relate it to the broader themes of the album as well. Let me remind you that Midnights is meant to be set as Taylor lies awake late at night, turning over in her mind every experience she’s ever had, carefully considering how it affects her today. I think this absolutely plays into this character of the “Mastermind”, who plans everything out, and thinks of every possibility. And what’s interesting is, while this is mainly a positive thing in this song, this is actually not the last Taylor will explore this tendency of hers.

After all, I haven’t yet gotten to that chaotic 3 a.m. surprise, right? Yep, the night Midnights dropped, Taylor returned three hours later to drop 7 extra tracks, vaults, as it were, in addition to the 13 original tracks on the album. As time has gone on, these songs have come to be adopted as part of the Midnights canon, though I find their iterations on the themes we’ve discussed quite interesting.

3 a.m. and Bonus Tracks

The Great War

“The Great War” discusses a conflict between Taylor and her lover, illustrated with the symbol of an actual battle. However, rather than being a two-sided conflict, Taylor identifies herself as the main culprit behind it all. The chorus returns to this image of her lover reaching out for her, even as she gets swept away by her own insecurity and distrust.

This all culminates in a moment in the bridge when she characterizes her lover as a fallen soldier in their conflict – “Looked up at me with honor and truth / Broken and blue / So I called off the troops / That was the night I nearly lost you.” In seeing her lover vulnerable, she realizes her mistake and forgives, and the song leans on imagery of war memorials to show the way the conflict has come to serve as a reminder of the strength of the relationship and a vow to never repeat her mistakes.

Again, we see this return of memory and its effects in the present – in this case, encouraging Taylor not to fall back on old bad patterns. In hindsight, though, I will say that I find this song particularly sad, considering it’s likely about Joe and… well, we know that something must have happened to surpass the conflict in this “Great War” to finally end it.

Bigger Than The Whole Sky

Of all the songs on every edition of Midnights, I find this one the most difficult to pin down. I mean, sure, I think the meaning of it feels straightforward. It’s about a loss, and a huge one at that. But I feel a little unsure on how, exactly, this loss fits into the overall themes and situations explored in Midnights thus far.

That might explain why it’s a vault and not on the main album, but what I find so interesting about this song is how non-specific it is. This is a song that sits almost entirely in metaphor, exploring feelings of grief almost entirely in the abstract. This is a pretty stark difference to so many other of the explorations of emotion throughout this album, which tend to be quite concrete and focused in specific scenes and situations.

Still, that grief feels extremely heavy throughout, to the point that I have no doubt that whatever caused this grief absolutely aligns with previous examples of pain and heartbreak in the past sneaking into the present and coloring everything it touches.

Paris

The beginning of this song sees Taylor receiving some very secondhand gossip from an unnamed source. But Taylor lets us know in no uncertain terms that she doesn’t care at all about what’s going on with other people – she’s in love.

Yes, we’re returning once more to that feeling of the honeymoon phase, and this honeymoon is in the capitol of love itself – Paris. At least, metaphorically, as this song seems to explore a lot of the same themes of “Lavender Haze” and “Sweet Nothing,” detailing a love so potent that Taylor dcoesn’t care about anything else going on. It’s a love so powerful that it makes anywhere she is, even her own bedroom drinking cheap wine, feeling like a romantic street corner somewhere far away.

The metaphor also works to describe Taylor’s state of mind – she’s far away, somewhere else, not paying attention to what is going on in the here and now. It makes me feel like this is yet another example of the desire to stay naïve and happy in her own little love bubble.

High Infidelity

Midnights is no stranger to self-criticism. After all, we’ve already seen Taylor reflect on her own self-hatred, as well as some of her less than perfect behavior in her past in “Anti-Hero” and “The Great War.” But nowhere do the transgressions get as blatant and as interesting as in “High Infidelity.”

As the title suggests, this song is about infidelity – Taylor’s. In the light of a relationship that is just not working for her, Taylor confesses that she’s looking for happiness with someone else. “Do you really wanna know where I was April 29^th? Do I really have to tell you how he brought me back to life?” (Coincidentally, April 29^th likely refers to the night Taylor first spotted Joe Alwyn at a party.)

What’s interesting about this, though, is that the song highlights a lot of parts about her relationship seem not just unfulfilling, but downright toxic. The song opens with “Lock broken, slur spoken / Wound open, game token / I didn’t know you were keeping count,” which to me suggests a relationship that was already on the rocks, with someone calling another person by a slur, hurting each other, and carefully keeping score.

So while Taylor seems somewhat knowledgeable about how her behavior is hurting someone else, she ultimately seems convinced that there was a good reason for her to move on – though perhaps she could have done so a bit more elegantly.

I think this moment of moral ambiguity is really fascinating as an addition to the overall themes of Midnights, reflecting on your past, the good and bad, as this situation feels to me like a bad situation that almost needed to happen in order to get out of something worse.

Glitch

A variation on the themes presented in “Snow On The Beach,” “Glitch” characterizes the beginning of a new relationship as something totally out of the blue, impossible, unexpected. She sets the stage with a casual relationship – “We were supposed to be just friends” – and explores the way things steadily got more and more serious, despite seemingly all odds and her own intentions.

This is a fairly straightforward song, with instrumentation that matches the technical malfunction the title refers to, so I don’t have much more to say. It feels to me like yet another reflection on the situations that led to her (at the time) current relationship, and the ways things seem to have fallen into place despite the odds.

Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve

Hoo boy. This song is a juggernaut. Maybe one of my all-time favorite songs Taylor has ever written.

In this song, Taylor points out a relationship she was in too young that, in hindsight, she realizes never should have happened. She obsessively finds every moment where things could have been different, where the person who came along and took away her innocence could have simply made a different choice, saw her for the child she was, and turned away.

Oh yeah, that’s right. If you’re not up on the Taylor Swift lore, you may not realize that one of Taylor’s worst exes, John Mayer, dated her when she was 19 and he was 32. The themes of a relationship she was too young for plus her explicitly dropping her age – “I damn sure never would’ve danced with the devil at nineteen” – explicitly confirms that this is the relationship she is talking about.

Taylor’s delivery of her own regret and despair at a situation she was all too young to handle is made even more potent by the fact that, timing-wise, Taylor was likely around 32 when she wrote this very song – the age Mayer was when they had their relationship.

Interestingly, her regret at this relationship is not a new concept in her discography. Way back at the time, she wrote another of my favorite songs, “Dear John,” which also shows off her realization that she was just too young to have participated equally in the relationship with Mayer. But that song took on a bit of the guilt herself, admonishing herself for her poor decisions. By contrast, this song seems far more aware of just how unhealthy this relationship was, seemingly because of how much it continues to affect her into the present. That makes this song absolutely another example of those explorations of how situations in the past haunt us in the present, the very core of Midnights.

I also think this song does the same thing other songs on the album have done by commenting on the same situation in a totally different way. However, the song this pairs with is not on Midnights, it’s the aforementioned “Dear John.” The connection isn’t just that the songs are about the same relationship, but also in how both “Would’ve” and “Could’ve” appear in the verses, but the final word, “Should’ve”, doesn’t.

…Until you look at “Dear John”’s final refrain – “You should’ve known.”

Dear Reader

Remember how I mentioned that “Mastermind” takes on Taylor’s character as a meticulous planner and schemer in more of an overall positive light? And I mentioned that this would not be the final word on this particular idea? Well, here we are, with the song that ends the 3 a.m. tracklist and therefore could be understood to be an alternate final song, just as “Mastermind” was the final song on the standard edition.

In “Dear Reader,” Taylor directly addresses the reader, laying out advice she has learned throughout her life and relationships. It seems at first that this is exactly what it seems on the tin, aligning quite well, even, with the previous themes of Midnights. Taylor is reflecting on what she has learned and sharing it with her listeners.

But then, we get to the chorus. “Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart.”

As the song continues, listeners come to realize that everything Taylor is saying is the sort of behavior someone going through a crisis might fall on when they feel they have absolutely no other choice. “Get out your map / Pick somewhere and just run.” “Burn all the files, desert all your past lives / And if you don’t recognize yourself that means you did it right.”

To further solidify this point, in the bridge, Taylor fills the listener in on where she is physically and emotionally as she tells us all of this. She’s alone at home, her “fourth drink” in her hand. “These desperate prayers of a cursed man spilling out to your for free / But darling, darling please / You wouldn’t take my word for it if you knew who was talking.”

The song ends with a distant voice repeating “You should find another guiding light, but I shine so bright.”

This song is… phew. It’s a lot. It almost seems to counter what “Mastermind” set out to show – the complicated beauty of her tendency to plot and plan to please the people she loves and the people who love her versus her own tendency to misrepresent her reality, and say what she is feeling in the moment, even when she’s come to find that that often turns out to be misleading or even unhealthy.

In a lot of ways this song counters the very themes of Midnights itself, repeating in no uncertain terms that nothing she has concluded on this album should be believed – after all, when you’re lying awake, bleary-eyed and drowsy, you’re not doing your best thinking and analysis on the reality of your life and feelings. In a shocking twist, all of the truth Taylor has laid out on this album so far is undercut as she suggests we would maybe be better off if we didn’t believe her at all.

Hits Different

There are two final songs to discuss, that being the Target exclusive track “Hits Different” and the  vault track, “You’re Losing Me.” As far as thematic cohesiveness goes, I do think the former aligns a bit more obviously, at least to me, as I feel like the latter was released less for how it fits on Midnights thematically and more for fan communication purposes (but I’ll get to it). However, I do think the songs communicate with each other in an interesting way.

“Hits Different” explores an on-again off-again relationship during an off phase, where Taylor can’t help but wonder why this particular relationship is hurting her so much when in previous relationships she was able to move on no problem. The song has the feeling of a kind of spiral, particularly in the bridge, where Taylor tears through a list of futile coping mechanisms.

I unfortunately once again have to show my hand and discuss the fact that this is a pretty obvious Joe song – again, for no real explainable way besides just understanding of how Taylor has historically tended to write about him. And this Swiftie sense is also the reason why I feel like “Hits Different” is another example of an alternate take on a similar situation to “You’re Losing Me.” Though there is a bit of uncertainty at the end, as Taylor wonders if the sound of someone returning is her love or if it’s just her feverish, heartbroken imagination, I’ve always felt like the tone suggests that her relationship is indeed going to restart. After all, there’s a reason this relationship has stuck with her, a reason she’s so devoted to it despite the chaos.

You’re Losing Me

But then we get to “You’re Losing Me.” A huge tonal shift from “Hits Different,” which was far more upbeat, “You’re Losing Me” is a quiet ballad built upon a heartbeat. Rather than exploring why a chaotic relationship still feels special to Taylor, this is a song that explores the quiet death of a long-term relationship.

It’s a bit of a loose connection to “Hits Different” if you don’t know the context, so I’ll fill you in. As I mentioned, this is Midnight’s one “vault track”, separate from the 3 a.m. bonus edition. When it was first released, it was only available on a special, CD-only version of Midnights that was only sold at the Eras Tour merch booth and, for a limited time, on Taylor’s merch store. It was also released a good deal after Midnights, and I’ve always felt that it wasn’t exactly planned to be released.

No, instead, it has always read to me as an attempt by Taylor to communicate with her fans in the wake of the sudden and shocking news of her breakup with Joe. They had been together for six years prior and there had been no open signs of anything going wrong (though some fans might, with hindsight, suggest that they “knew all along”). For obvious reasons, Taylor didn’t want to go to the press to talk about her breakup, especially in the midst of the Eras Tour when the focus really should be on her incredible work. So, she released this one track and made it available in such a way that only really big fans would be likely to even know it existed.

This situation is also why a lot of people tend to interpret Midnights as a breakup album. And, yes, some parts of my analysis up to this point do maybe point toward cracks in her relationship with Joe – particularly, fans like to cite the naivete of “Lavender Haze” and the way its lines about her flippantly denying ever wanting to be married jar disturbingly with this song’s “I wouldn’t marry me either” line.

But, if you’ll allow me to get a little parasocial, I’ve always felt a bit differently. I think Midnights was made during a time where Taylor wasn’t quite sure where to go in her personal life. Experiencing a ton of career success as she delved into her back catalogue, I have a feeling that whatever relationship struggles she was experiencing with Joe were confusing and heartbreaking, and so she wanted to lean on the lessons she had learned in the past to try and make sense of it. This is why we see her go back over her dealings with fame, with past heartbreaks, and explore multiple angles of these very topics – she wanted to figure out where to go next.

And yes, this is also why this album features multiple love songs that are about Joe – “Lavender Haze”, “Snow On The Beach”, “Labyrinth”, “Sweet Nothing” – songs that looked back on when the relationship was good, when it made her feel happy and fulfilled, to find whether she could carry that with her into the present.

It’s also why I point to this song’s dual nature with “Hits Different.” Knowing that they’re both about her relationship with Joe during a rocky patch, but with one taking a sillier, more loving angle, framed as if the relationship is something special, and the other resigned to the relationship’s inevitable demise, I can’t help but point to how it was “Hits Different” that got released with the album, and “You’re Losing Me” that came after it was clear that her optimism that things could maybe still work out were well and truly gone.

Either way, though, it’s Midnight’s final dual exploration, and it’s what has me truly convinced that this is an album about confusion, about plumbing the depths of your past to look for wisdom for your future. It’s an album about uncertainty, an album that takes on complicated, nuanced emotions with no real attempt to justify them.

I feel like Midnights is likely some of Taylor Swift’s greatest work. The only thing holding a lot of fans back from understanding this is the way it wasn’t the album they had expected. But, as we finally leave it behind and look toward the Tortured Poets era, I can only imagine that it will become even more beloved with time.