Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/Handout
Believe it or not, Taylor Swift is our most grandiose pop star. That may seem like a stretch in a world where we have Gagas, Beyoncés, and Madonnas, but it’s true. Taylor Swift is a maximalist at heart—she goes for broke every single time and milks everything for all it’s worth. Even the stripped-down, singer/songwriter folk of her pair of pandemic albums, folklore and evermore, was massive in scale; Taylor Swift, the most popular artist in the world, had surprise-released two albums within six months. The world stops whenever her hand grabs the globe.
The songs on those two albums might have seemed smaller and more refined, but it was only because the poppiness that defined her post-2012 albums had been locked away. Listen more closely, and the enormity of the lyrical worlds that Swift made her signature so long ago still remained. Subtlety is not her strong suit. Taylor Swift is all big emotions and breathless declarations; the human version of the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach right after sending a risky text.
Cut to the night of the 2022 VMAs in August, when Swift surprise-announced her new record, Midnights, which was released Friday. In the two months after that announcement, fans waited on the eventual release of a lead single that never came. Instead, she teased out the album’s tracklist in TikTok videos and dropped easter eggs for loyalists to lose sleep over. How appropriate: Midnights, by Swift’s accord, is “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout [her] life.”