Was Staying up ‘Til Midnight Worth it?
22 October, 2022, Taylor Swift greeted us at midnight. After releasing 13 tracks, as many had previously predicted, she released seven bonus songs at 3 am. From singing “Snow On The Beach” with Lana Del Ray, to singing about “Karma”–Taylor digs deep into her insecurities, while also challenging her vocal ability–for this album. Although Lana Del Rey was barely featured in “Snow On the Beach,” it tells a beautiful story about feelings of mutual love, Taylor explained in an Instagram Reel.
“I like snow on the beach because it just felt like a great analogy to life; things and experiences can be beautiful but they can always have a weird or dark side,” Isabelle LaPorte, 9, said.
Midnights is the baby of Reputation and 1989. Reputation is an album with a hateful, confrontational, destructive, and revenge type vibe, while 1989 provides a healing, heartbreaking, dramatic, and messy vibe. Some may say there is a bit of Lover thrown throughout the mix, but only in regards to some of the album’s upbeat nature. Lover is a happy, loving, summertime type of album. Midnights is the opposite.
As Taylor phrased in a message to Apple Music subscribers, Midnights represents, “the story of thirteen sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.”
“I read it somewhere that she keeps a notebook next to her bed, so if she thinks of a song in the middle of the night, she writes it down. Or if she’s depressed she turns it into a song,” Isabelle added.
On Midnights, Taylor has some rather aggressive moments, such as when she sings, “I don’t start sh*t, but I can tell you how it ends / Don’t get sad, get even / So on the weekends, I don’t dress for friends / Lately I’ve been dressing for revenge,” in “Vigilante Sh*t”. This song furthers the rumors of a scrapped Taylor album–which was supposedly named Karma, but got reworked into her Reputation album. Fans believe Taylor was going to put this song into “Karma” because it has a very strong want-to-get-revenge, dramatic vibe that Reputation emphasizes.
“It’s me, hi I'm the problem. It’s me,” Taylor sings in “Anti-Hero,” the perfect self-hate anthem. “This song really is a guided tour throughout all of the things I tend to hate about myself,” Taylor said on October 3 on Instagram. Taylor makes fun of her fame and insecurities surrounding it, oddly referencing the television show 30 Rock, when she sings “Sometimes I feel like everyone is a sexy baby, and I’m a monster on the hill.”
Although many people aren’t loving this album, because they were expecting something similar to previous favorite albums, I believe Taylor was just staying true to herself.
“The female artists have reinvented themselves 20 times more than the male artists. They have to or else you’re out of a job. Constantly having to reinvent, constantly finding new facets of yourself that people find to be shiny. ‘Be new to us, be young to us, but only in a new way and only in the way we want’,” Taylor explained in the Netflix documentary “Miss Americana”. As Taylor continues to reinvent herself, we constantly wonder what she will have next in store for us.