If something is keeping you up at night, Taylor Swift’s new album appears designed to remedy that very thing. For her anyway.
The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter on Thursday revealed the tracklist for her forthcoming album, “Midnights,” which chronicles “the stories of 13 sleepless nights.”
Swift literally kept her fans up Thursday to Friday night with hourly, middle-of-the-night reveals on TikTok teasing the new album, which strikes on Oct. 21.
Side A, she said, leads with “Lavender Haze,” a “Mad Men” reference to her relationship with actor Joe Alwyn, and continues with “Maroon,” “Anti-Hero,” “Snow on the Beach” (a collaboration with singer Lana Del Rey), “You’re on Your Own, Kid” and “Midnight Rain.”
In a video she shared earlier this week, the superstar said that “Anti-Hero” is her favorite song that she’s ever written and delves deep into her insecurities and her struggle with her “unmanageably sized” life.
Side B features “Question...?” “Vigilante S—,” “Bejeweled,” “Labyrinth,” “Karma” (a track rumored to be about her drama with rapper Kanye West and reality star Kim Kardashian), “Sweet Nothing” and “Mastermind.”
The 32-year-old global phenom announced “Midnights” in August upon taking the top prize at the MTV Video Music Awards. The new music comes after she released dual 2020 projects — the Grammy Award-winning album “Folklore” and its follow-up “Evermore” — only five months apart.
Last year, she released her rerecorded “Taylor’s Version” albums of 2008’s “Fearless” and 2012’s “Red” to much fanfare. (The rerecording made good on her 2019 pledge to take back ownership of the six-album catalog she lost when Scooter Braun purchased and sold her previous record label, Big Machine.)
Earlier this week, Swift launched a kitschy “Midnights Mayhem With Me” series on TikTok that featured the musician playing a retro bingo-style game to revealed a new track name each night. The album will also have four covers, and if fans put them together, they will make a clock.
“We lie awake in love and and in fear, in turmoil and in tears,” she wrote on Twitter in August, sharing an image of tracks numbered from “one” to “thirteen” accompanying the album announcement. “We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in self-made cages and pray that we aren’t — right this minute — about to make some fateful life-altering mistake.
“This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face. For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching — hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve ... we’ll meet ourselves.”
———
