Midnights (The Til Dawn Edition)

Let’s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honours at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organising her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On Midnights, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—if you don’t count the two she’s just re-recorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout [her] life”, as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood panelling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the Mad Men-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimac