taylor swift
Page: 20
Taylor Swift‘s Midnights arrived at last on Friday (Oct. 21), and fans know that the pop superstar is not afraid of some subtle, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shade in her music.
The 13 tracks of the singer’s 10th studio album tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” according to Swift, which immediately had fans analyzing the lyrics to figure out what (and who) keeps Taylor up at night.
And while some of the swoon-worthy love songs like “Lavender Haze” and “Sweet Nothing” are clearly about her boyfriend Joe Alwyn, who wrote the latter with her, many of the songs are less obvious. As a result, Swifties flooded Twitter with their thoughts.
See below for some of the most popular unconfirmed fan theories about which celebrities Swift is calling out on Midnights, from John Mayer to Kanye West.
Taylor Swift finally unveiled her Midnights album on Friday (Oct. 21), and to celebrate, Sportsnet anchor Faizal Khamisa challenged himself to reference all 13 tracks of the original album while running through his sports broadcast.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
“Alex Bregman was once baseball’s ‘Anti-Hero,’ but now he’s just plain hero for Houston,” he says at one point, before calling a heated hockey fight some “Vigilante S—.” He flawlessly incorporated all tracks into the broadcast, checking off each song as he went along.
While the broadcast featured the 13 tracks that dropped at midnight, Swift promised a “special very chaotic surprise” in the wee hours following the album’s release, and she didn’t disappoint, dropping a trove of seven extra Midnights tracks.
“Surprise!” she wrote on social media. “I think of Midnights as a complete concept album, with those 13 songs forming a full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour. However! There were other songs we wrote on our journey to find that magic 13.”
The fuller, 20-track version of Midnights is titled Midnights (3am Edition), and includes the previously unannounced songs “The Great War,” “Bigger Than the Whole Sky,” “Paris,” “High Infidelity,” “Glitch,” “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve.”
After a weekend of soaking up those 20 new tunes, Swifties can tune into NBC on Monday for Swift’s previously confirmed appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Then on Tuesday, Oct. 25, a second, unnamed Midnights music video will drop. And next Friday, Oct. 28, Swift will stop by the BBC for The Graham Norton Show in the U.K.
Just like clockwork, Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated 10th studio album has arrived.
Swifties have been eagerly awaiting its release since the pop superstar broke the news during her video of the year acceptance speech at the 2022 VMAs. “I thought it might be a fun moment to tell you that my brand-new album comes out Oct. 21,” she coyly revealed. “And I will tell you more at midnight.”
And tell us more, she did. Aptly titled Midnights, she explained that the album would tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life” — inviting fans all along “a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.”
In the wee hours of the night, three hours after the album’s initial release at midnight ET sharp on Oct. 21, the 13-track project became a 20-track one. The singer-songwriter surprise dropped the “3 am Edition,” which contains seven additional new songs.
To celebrate her newest full-length set, Billboard dug through Swift’s hefty catalog to find every mention of “midnight” in a song. Night in general has been a recurring theme in her music for over a decade, yet we were surprised to find that that exact word only appears in 10 out of 200+ songs (and four being from Midnights alone). So we decided to take things a step further and also count the times she sings “middle of the night” as honorable mentions — because take away a few letters and it’s the same darn thing (and before you @ us, no, we are not listing her specific mid-night mentions of 1:58 a.m., 2 a.m., 2:30 a.m., 3 a.m. and so forth).
Without further ado, from Fearless to Evermore to Midnights, here are all of Swift’s “midnight” and “middle of the night” lyrics, listed chronologically (with “middle of the night” lyrics beginning at No. 11).
Taylor Swift gets vulnerable about some of her insecurities in the video for “Anti-Hero” from her new Midnights album. But now she wants Swifties to do the same. In conjunction with the album’s release, Swift joined YouTube Shorts to launch the #TSAntiHeroChallenge on Friday morning (Oct. 21), inviting her fans to “share their anti-heroic traits” to the strains of the pop tune about looking in the mirror and seeing the real you.
“The #TSAntiHeroChallenge is all about acknowledging and celebrating the traits that make each of us truly unique and showcasing one’s true self in a FUN way,” reads a prompt for the viral challenge.” An anti-heroic trait could be as simple as always grabbing the last slice of pizza, clapping at the end of movies, always putting your feet on the car dashboard, using the same word to start your daily Wordle, leaving your clean laundry in the basket until the next time you do it, pretending you didn’t already watch the next episode of the series you watch with your pals, or even treating your cat like a human. Anything goes!”
The rules are pretty simple: watch the “Anti-Hero” video — written and directed by Swift and featuring some classic comedic cameos — then think about which anti-heroic traits you have, go to YouTube Shorts, create a short, add sound from “Anti-Hero,” then the #TSAntiHeroChallenge tag and publish.
Taylor primed the pump with a pair of Shorts video, including one in which she pokes fun at her anti-social, cat mom tendencies.
Check out the shorts below.
To celebrate the release of her highly anticipated 10th studio album Midnights, Taylor Swift dropped her first music video of the album era on Friday (Oct. 21) and Swifties will be dissecting this one for a while.
The super dramatic clip for “Anti-Hero” features Swift attending her own funeral, Tom Sawyer-style, doing shots and drinking wine straight from the bottle with her party hard doppelgänger and blowing up to 50-foot giant Tay size for a trippy Alice in Wonderland-style dinner party crash.
“Track three, ‘Anti-Hero,’ is one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written,” Swift previously said of the song. “I really don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before.” The singer/songwriter directed and wrote the treatment for the five-minute clip that dropped on Friday morning. It opens with Taylor seated at a 1970s breakfast table in a kitschy home haunted by ghosts wearing sunglasses before she opens the door to find party Taylor waiting outside, reciting the instant classic line, “It’s me, hi/ I’m the problem, it’s me.”
The dynamic duo then down some shots as bad Tay smashes a guitar before oversized Swift crawls into a dinner scene and has her heart pierced by Cupid’s arrow, drawing purple glitter blood. Then it’s back to double Taylor bouncing on a bed and throwing back more shots (followed by purple glitter puke) before a dramatic interlude at her own funeral.
The reading of the will dramedy that unfolds amid the song/video that takes on insecurity and self-consciousness is heightened with cameos from comedians Mike Birbiglia (Don’t Think Twice) and John Early (Search Party), who battle over not-dead Taylor’s earthly possession with entitled daughter-in-law Mary Elizabeth Ellis (It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia). “Watch my nightmare scenarios and intrusive thoughts play out in real time,” Swift tweeted about the theme of the clip.
Sorry kids, there are no secret encoded messages or Easter eggs, the disappointed heirs find out as Taylor peeks at their misery from inside her coffin — which sits next to a classic Easter egg picture of aged-up cat lady Taylor cradling two armloads of kitties. After the room erupts into grief chaos, the clip ends with the two Taylors meeting up with Giant Taylor for a swig of bottled wine on a rooftop at night.
“I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized,” Swift continued in the video previewing the visual, aptly posted at midnight. “Not to sound too dark, but I just struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person — don’t feel bad for me, you don’t need to. But this song really is a real guided tour through all the things I tend to hate about myself; we all hate things about ourselves.”
Watch the “Anti-Hero” music video below.
At the stroke of midnight (obviously), Taylor Swift unveiled her highly anticipated 10th studio album, Midnights, on Friday (Oct. 21).
The 13 tracks on the album tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” according to Swift.
“We lie awake in love and fear, in turmoil and in tears,” she later wrote about the record in two paragraphs displayed across a promotional photo posted to social media. “We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in our 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,” she continued. “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.”
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
The 11-time Grammy winner also revealed that “Anti-Hero,” track three on Midnights, will be getting a music video released at 8 a.m. Friday, hours after the full album drops.
Midnights follows Swift’s sister albums Folklore and Evermore, which were released in July 2020 and December 2020, respectively.
Listen to Midnights in full below.
Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album, Midnights, was introduced to us as an exercise in restlessness. “This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night,” Swift wrote in August while announcing the project, “a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face.”
This explanation for Midnights makes sense in the context of its arrival. Less than two years after the unexpected, two-pronged opus of Folklore and Evermore, and smack in the middle of her extended process of re-recording (and expanding) her first six studio albums, Swift certainly did not need to release an album of original material this year – especially considering that she already has a mini-career’s worth of new material that she has yet to even play on tour.
Yet like any middle-of-the-night rumination, these songs gnawed at her, begging to be expanded upon instead of stored away for another day. Midnights brims with the bleary-eyed doubts, private triumphs, left-field questions and long-term musings that haunt us in the darkness; Swift felt compelled to hoist hers into the light.
There are no skippable tracks on Swift’s new album… but we already know that there are a few standouts out of the 13 on the standard edition. Here is a humble, preliminary opinion on the best songs on Taylor Swift’s Midnights.
Want more on Taylor Swift’s new album? Click here to read a full review of Midnights, and don’t forget to check out this breakdown of the 20-plus different versions of the album’s physical format.
Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album, Midnights, was introduced to us as an exercise in restlessness. “This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night,” Swift wrote in August while announcing the project, “a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face.”
This explanation for Midnights makes sense in the context of its arrival. Less than two years after the unexpected, two-pronged opus of Folklore and Evermore, and smack in the middle of her extended process of re-recording (and expanding) her first six studio albums, Swift certainly did not need to release an album of original material this year – especially considering that she already has a mini-career’s worth of new material that she has yet to even play on tour.
Yet like any middle-of-the-night rumination, these songs gnawed at her, begging to be expanded upon instead of stored away for another day. Midnights brims with the bleary-eyed doubts, private triumphs, left-field questions and long-term musings that haunt us in the darkness; Swift felt compelled to hoist hers into the light.
Working closely once again with longtime kindred spirit Jack Antonoff, Swift uses Midnights to experiment with her sound in a range of directions; gone are the guitars that helped define Folklore and Evermore, replaced by an emotionally revealing brand of pop that’s rhythmic, synth-driven and guided more than ever by Swift’s razor-sharp lyricism. Midnights will draw comparisons to Swift’s more eclectic full-lengths like 2017’s Reputation and 2019’s Lover, simply by existing as more sonically amorphous than the mainstream pop of 1989 or the indie-folk of Folklore and Evermore.
While this project does resemble those albums in Swift’s tendency to color outside the lines of its core aesthetic, Midnights is also more personal and focused, with a relatively short run time (13 tracks in 44 minutes), just one guest (Lana Del Rey, stopping by for the swirling sing-along “Snow on the Beach”) and a smaller studio team (Antonoff and Swift are the only producers listed on the album) yielding a collection of messages that sound delivered straight from Swift’s sleepless mind.
Detours are taken, and voices are warped; Swift glistens in natural beauty, and lets more f-bombs fly than ever. Midnights can be messy, and that messiness is purposeful. Through her songwriting, Swift has embraced the complexities of her personality — that she can be both the bitter partner declaring “By the way, I’m going out tonight!” on “Bejeweled,” and the woman terrified of falling in love again (“You know how much I hate that everybody just expects me to bounce back / Just like that”) one song later on “Labyrinth.”
Swift’s place in popular music continues to be larger than life, and that status will likely be reflected with the commercial performance of the most anticipated album release of the fall. But on Midnights, Swift shrinks the scale, and pinpoints the humanity that has made her such a beloved storyteller. She didn’t need to capture those long nights, but that insomnia has made her discography, and legacy, all the richer.
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
Hours before Taylor Swift‘s Midnights hit stores and streaming services, the pop superstar teased her 10th studio album during the Thursday Night Football game on Oct. 20 between the New Orleans Saints and Arizona Cardinals.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
After an introduction from Swift herself, a visual spectacle was unleashed on fans, that appears to show a series of scenes from music videos — possibly for all 10 tracks on her new album.
Credits at the end of the teaser revealed a cast of featured characters, in alphabetical order: Jack Antonoff, Laith Ashley, Mike Birbiglia, Laura Dern, John Early, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Haim (Alana, Danielle & Este), Pat McGrath, Swift herself and Dita Von Teese.
In her intro, Swift called the first look a “teaser trailer of the secret projects i’ve been working on for a really long time. Those projects are the Midnights Music Movies, the music videos that I made for this album to sort of explore visually the world of this record. I love storytelling, I love songwriting, i love writing videos, I love directing them, and this was a really fun opportunity to work again with the cinematographer Rina Yang, who was my collaborator on the All Too Well 10-minute short film. So we really wanted to challenge ourselves to do different things this time around and stretch, and I’m really proud of what we made and I really hope you like them. We worked with some amazing actors that you’ll find out more about at the end of the teaser trailer,” she concluded, referencing the credits.
We’ll have to wait for the arrival of Midnights and the first music videos — for “Anti-Hero,” arriving at 3 a.m. ET — for more details.
Ahead of the Thursday Night Football game on Amazon Prime, Taylor announced the trailer by telling fans: “You would see it before the Midnights album came out, so meet me there?”
If you’re a Swiftie and don’t have a Prime account yet, you can join today and enjoy a free 30-day trial and watch the Midnights teaser in tonight’s game. After your first free month, Amazon Prime will cost $14.99/month, or $139 for the annual plan.
For over a decade, Taylor Swift has been offering fans a multitude of options when it comes to purchasing her albums across physical formats with exclusive editions available through a longstanding partnership with Target. But with her new album, Midnights, out Friday (Oct. 20), she’s truly outdone herself.
There are over 20 different versions of the album available on CD, LP and cassette in various colors, with different cover artwork, censored and uncensored, with and without autographs. That plethora of options is great for fans who may want a different version than their friends, or who — as many seem to — feel driven to collect them all. It’s also great for Swift, who’s earning more money from increased sales that will impact her performance on the Billboard charts and likely add up to one of the year’s best album debut weeks.
Few artists, if any, attract as much attention as Swift does for her promotion and sales strategy, thanks largely to her close relationship with her fans. In turn, she is brilliant at developing physical goods they want to buy, in addition to just streaming her music. Last year, following the release of her re-recordings of Fearless and Red, she accounted for one out of every 50 albums sold in the U.S., according to Luminate. She knows Swifties are collectors, and is now providing not only the multiple Midnights versions but elaborate containers to put them in, like a $39 CD clock or vinyl clock for $49, which display the four albums in a timely format, or $79 faux-leather vinyl collector’s case.
In today’s streaming-centric music industry, physical albums have become collectible tokens of fandom, and artists have been responding to growing demand. BTS and other K-pop megastars regularly rack up huge numbers by selling CDs and LPs with different colors and exclusive postcards and photos sold as collectible items, with the music as a secondary benefit. When South Korean boy band Stray Kids’ MAXIDENT topped the most recent Billboard 200 chart for the week of Oct. 22, it did so with 10 CD versions, including autographed CDs and exclusive Barnes & Noble and Target releases. Increasingly, it’s becoming a mainstream strategy for acts in the U.S., too. Such disparate acts as Denzel Curry and Slipknot have recently released various physical versions of their new albums as well. It just so happens that these sales all count towards an album’s Billboard chart performances. So by offering four different versions of Midnights per format, Swift is at least quadrupling her revenue from some super fans, as well as their impact on the charts.
Based on Billboard‘s research, here is a full rundown of the different Midnights versions fans can buy:
CDs:Moonstone BlueBlood MoonMahoganyJade Green
Signed CDs:Moonstone Blue (Webstore Exclusive)Blood Moon (Webstore Exclusive)Mahogany (Webstore Exclusive)Jade Green (Webstore Exclusive)
Clean-version CDs:Moonstone BlueBlood MoonMahoganyJade Green
Vinyl LPs:Moonstone BlueBlood MoonMahoganyJade Green
Signed Vinyl LPs:Moonstone Blue (Webstore Exclusive)Blood Moon (Webstore Exclusive)Mahogany (Webstore Exclusive)Jade Green (Webstore Exclusive)
Cassettes:Moonstone Blue
Target Exclusives:Lavender Deluxe CD (With Three Bonus Tracks)Lavender Vinyl LP
Digital:Moonstone Blue (Webstore Exclusive)Moonstone Blue (Clean) (Webstore Exclusive)Standard – 13 TracksStandard – 13 Tracks (Clean)Standard – 14 TracksStandard – 14 Tracks (Clean)