Taylor Swift - Midnights

My teen's hot take is that it sounds like a cross between half of Lover and half of Reputation.

sounds closer to 1989 than lover to me

the mark they saw on my collarbone
the rust that grew between telephones

^^ "maroon" is evidence that taylor swift should only write songs about what colors remind her of

in addition to rilo kiley, "you're on your own, kid" reminds me a little of vanessa carlton's "white houses," the song that invented taylor swift in 2004

Dropping a surprise Deluxe Edition on the day the album comes out (and everyone’s orders have already been locked in) is a shit move.

i mean if we're talking about physical pre-orders, the deluxe edition is digital only anyway

After two times thru I don't have a firm grasp on this but I think I a.) like the vibe and her attempt at something different sonically; b.) also think the vibe has a bit of a deadening/homogenizing effect on the songs; and c.) the songs are ... pretty good?

I think "a pretty good Taylor Swift album" isn't as exciting an idea as a great one or an abject failure and I know it's more of a tepid take than a hot one. But that's where I feel like I'm landing, pending more time with it.

xp oh, ok - lol

agree with tipsy, listened to this last night and it seemed 'pretty good' but very little of it stood out to me; it has a very homogenous feel to it.

This album feels very "Johnny Fever's Shambala Threads circa 2014-2017".

Or alternatively, "1989, but we're just going to stick to sounding mostly like Lorde and Chrvches instead of trying to rewrite Happy".

I was thinking Lorde too, but I realize that probably mostly means Antonoff.

One vocal line definitely reminded me of Lorde, I forget what it was

Possibly, but 1989 gave me Lorde vibes in some songs at the time, and that was before Lorde started working with Antonoff.

ok for the most part i'm like "i see why the bonus tracks didn't make the record" but i am baffled that "hits different" didn't make it

Joel Little-era Lorde is a more apt comparison than Jack Antonoff-era Lorde.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1kbLwvqugk

Bejeweled, Labyrinth, Karma run is very strong. Also love Midnight Rain.

Can't be the only one disappointed that Taylor used her barely-matched power and pull within the industry to make four pressings of the album that form a clock (or something) instead of being a concept like Zaireeka (Taylor's Version).

strangling vinyl production for the rest of the industry in the process!

I know what the title of this album is, but just now misread it as “Midgets”.

it's midge nights, and it's about the 2007 american league division series

Lol

delighted by the tall girl angst on "anti-hero"

brad otm about "hits different" but maybe she felt it was too upbeat lol

i'm really just delighted that she's discovered the idea of consistency with these last 3 albums, after how all-over the place her albums had been for ages

Xp it's not tall girl angst, it's fatphobia masquerading as ED commentary. The music video makes it explicit. Pretty disappointing.

Haven't seen the video yet, but I do not really see the "fatphobia" reading. Earlier this month she was talking about how this song addressed her life as being "unmanageably sized":

💬 | “I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized […] the idea of not feeling like a person. Don’t feel bad for me, you don’t need to. This song is a real guided tour through all the things I hate about myself.” — Taylor Swift on Track 3 Anti-Hero pic.twitter.com/f1DzHpdBA2

— Taylor Swift News 🕰️ (@TSwiftNZ) October 3, 2022

Yeah well I'd watch the video...

i watched the video and you’re gonna have to hold my hand and explain bc it just registered to me as… tall girl angst

i don't think the scene of her as a giant is fatphobia or that she mishandled the pretty banal ED commentary?

there's layers of too tall/too fat/too famous and she's addressing all of them

I mean, the scales reading 'fat'... Pretty explicit. Basically as a straight sized person she's saying one of her deepest fears is getting fat. That's not ok even as ED commentary. Fat liberation fans of Taylor are pissed...

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSRsqCAtm/

the video is pretty directly saying that obsessing over her weight is unhealthy?

It's the framing of it. Read the tiktok comments, so many people saying "her biggest fear is looking like me". She's upset a lot of fat fans. I don't think we should dismiss minority perspectives, from the very people this type of discourse affects.

the bass on this album is v deep and rich. the drums dont hit, though.

I dunno this feels like when cis people cisplain something isn't transphobic... When trans people are saying it is.

If fat people say it's fatphobic, I'm going to believe them.

i mean you know nothing about my weight but just falling back on 'we should listen to __ identity!' can get pretty silly because you can find people from any minority with weird unreasonable opinions about what is and isn't offensive to them and cherry-pick them to bolster whatever you want

i'm reading it as pretty clearly as yes, she has internal struggles around her weight, but the whole point is she's saying that it's an unhealthy mindset to be in! it's not endorsing the fear and you haven't put forward any argument that it is

"Read the tiktok comments"
this is not something someone should ever do under any circumstances if they want to preserve their sanity and feelings of goodwill toward humanity

like i'm happy to listen to a more detailed critique but "read the tiktok comments" is not that, yeah

Much of the Miss Americana doco dwelt pretty frankly on Taylor’s very unhealthy eating disorder issues. It’s somewhat reductive to equate her ED with fatphobia.

Yeah it's not the best argument but explaining this shit is tiring. I've said my piece and you're welcome to do your own reading around how the way we talk about EDs is often fatphobic. But I'm not going to put a bunch of energy into explaining something that will mostly be dismissed anyway. Guess we're not there yet with fat liberation.

I'll see if I can find a good article or something. Sorry I can't be more erudite right now.

As someone who's about 60 lbs overweight, I wanna say that anyone on TikTok getting all blustery about Taylor being possibly fatphobic can stfu. You don't speak for every fat person, damn.

regardless of the merits of the scales scene i don't think it means that my interpretation of the song & video were wrong when they were about a different scene that also relates to the same lyric that she's clearly layering with multiple meanings.

i'm happy to believe the scales scene could be bad, but i just haven't seen a good explanation - taking it as an endorsement of fat = bad just seems particularly uncharitable to me. in my experience it is very good to get a proper understanding of what the argument is rather than relying on some vague comments on tiktok or wherever as an article of faith.

I read the scale thing as just a pretty straightforward depiction of an eating disorder, which she's talked about before. If it's fatphobic to depict someone with an eating disorder seeing herself as fat regardless of the number on the scale, then I don't know how you can simultaneously avoid fatphobia and normalize talking about & getting help for eating disorders.

The depiction of herself as huge - a kind of overgrown Alice in Wonderland who never finds a bottle that makes her shrink - read to me as insecurity about the sheer amount of space she takes up, both as a celebrity and as someone whose favorite aesthetic is middle-class cozy family life but whose actual desires and ambitions are too outsize for her to ever fit comfortably into that life. And I think there's a suggestion of clumsiness, too, that she knows that her gestures are too big, that she tries too hard, that she can telegraph her meanings and crush her enemies but she can't do subtlety.

I'm about halfway through the album and so far I'm underwhelmed and finding it all a bit samey, but I do really like Anti-Hero and the video. I really enjoy her comic acting these days, esp. the scene with Messy Taylor giving a lecture headed Everyone Will Betray You as normal Taylor nods along and takes notes.

It was neat to see Mary Elizabeth Ellis in the video, an actress I enjoy… I saw her at a Pavement show recently! (she ended up posting it on Instagram, so I’m not betraying any secrets here... turns out she’s a big Pave fan)

xp that's a great description, and this part:

someone whose favorite aesthetic is middle-class cozy family life but whose actual desires and ambitions are too outsize for her to ever fit comfortably into that life

I thought Mary Elizabeth Ellis was Kaitlin Olson at first

Sweet Nothing is a youth lagoon song, and I hate it

One way to think about this album: Evermore was perhaps not just the peak (so far) of “storytelling” Taylor, but also the album whose songs most frequently and deliberately zoomed out in terms of their sense of time and space: so many songs which have a clear sense of past, presence and future, the last of these often imagined by the main character (e.g. “so I’ll go back to LA and my so-called friends who’ll write books about me if I ever make it”). If the songs’ narrators seem like some of Taylor’s wisest, that’s in part because they’re often some of her most omniscient.

By comparison, Midnight’s songs feel very now-situated: even when they refer to past events, they typically remain locked within the mindset and perspectives of the protagonist’s current moment. So even if not all of the songs feel literally tied to or obviously set in middle-of-the-night scenarios, they’re almost all consistent with the kind of “piecing together” of events and impressions and conclusions we might engage in at that time.

The tension between “what I knew then” / “what I know now” has always been an important recurring motif of Taylor’s songwriting and in particular a large chunk of her best songs (think “Tim McGraw”, “Fifteen”, “The Best Day”, “Back To December”, “Dear John”, “Last Kiss”, “All Too Well”, “Holy Ground”…. etc. etc.).

So it’s perhaps not surprising that she has now made a quasi-concept album whose concept is basically “what I think I know right now”.