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Taylor Swift had yet another gift for fans at the stroke of midnight on Tuesday (Oct. 25), unveiling her second Midnights music video, this time for the shimmering “Bejeweled.”
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The Cinderella-inspired clip stars Swift in the familiar lead role, though it’s her bejeweled outfits, not a glass slipper, that catches everyone’s attention.
TayTay herself wrote and directed the music video. Keep an eye out for “Prince” Jack Antonoff and cameos from Laura Dern, the Haim sisters and Dita Von Teese, who encourages the pop superstar to slip into a giant cocktail glass. Stay watching for some fiery dragon-action at the close.
Earlier in the day, the pop superstar took to Instagram to announce the video’s release.
“Midnight, what a storied and fabled hour… On this sparkling evening I’ll be releasing my twist on a fairytale we all know. The one about the girl and her step sisters and the clock striking 12…” she captioned a photo of herself as Cinderella, sitting in a dark room wearing a worn down dress while sewing a glittery, midnight blue gown. “This video is wild, whimsical and created SPECIFICALLY for you, my beloved fans who have paved this shimmering path. Look out for some dazzling cameos! Join us later for a very Bejeweled premiere [diamond emoji].”
Midnights is already a global hit. The album set a new 24-hour streaming record on Spotify, and is expected to dominate sales charts around the world.
Watch the “Bejeweled” music video below.
Taylor Swift is continuing her rollout of the highly anticipated Midnights visuals, and the star took to social media on Monday (Oct. 24) that the next music video, this time for the track “Bejeweled,” will be arriving at the stroke of midnight.
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“Midnight, what a storied and fabled hour… On this sparkling evening I’ll be releasing my twist on a fairytale we all know. The one about the girl and her step sisters and the clock striking 12…” she captioned a photo of herself as Cinderella, sitting in a dark room wearing a worn down dress while sewing a glittery, midnight blue gown. “This video is wild, whimsical and created SPECIFICALLY for you, my beloved fans who have paved this shimmering path. Look out for some dazzling cameos! Join us later for a very Bejeweled premiere [diamond emoji].”
The “Bejeweled” video comes just days after Swift dropped her Midnights album in full, an extra seven songs as part of the album’s 3am Edition and the music video for “Anti-Hero.” The dramatic features Swift attending her own funeral, doing shots and drinking wine straight from the bottle with her party hard doppelgänger and blowing up to 50-foot giant for an Alice in Wonderland-style dinner party crash.
According to initial reports to Luminate, Midnights, which was released on Oct. 21, has sold more than 800,000 copies in the U.S. through its first day across all available formats (multiple digital album download, CD, vinyl and cassette variants). It has already logged the largest sales week for any album since 2017, is the top-selling album of 2022 year-to-date, and has set a modern-era record for single-week vinyl album sales.
Taylor Swift has been a regular fixture at the top of the Billboard 200 since 2008, when she notched her first No. 1 album with Fearless. Since then, she’s continued to break records, rack up No. 1s — 10 so far — and score eye-popping first-week unit totals.
While it’s difficult to compare debut-week performances of any single artist’s albums over time — owed to changes in market conditions and music consumption patterns — it’s enlightening to take a look back at Swift’s last five charted releases, from 2019’s Lover through 2021’s Red [Taylor’s Version], and at what fueled their debuts on the Billboard 200 albums chart.
The marketing and promotion techniques applied to those five releases likely informed the rollout plan of Swift’s 10th studio album, Midnights, which arrived Friday (Oct. 21). It bowed on streaming services and via retailers in a plethora of options: as a digital album download, multiple CD and vinyl LP variants and a cassette tape.
Midnights is Swift’s first studio album since Evermore, in 2020. Since then, she released two re-recorded albums, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version), both in 2021. Five months prior Evermore, she released its sister project, Folklore, and in 2019, Lover.
Midnights arrives after months of pre-release promotion and pre-orders — but no music from the 13-track album was released until the album dropped in full. The set’s “Anti-Hero” garnered an official music video on Oct. 21 and is being promoted as its lead radio single. The album is available to purchase in a standard digital album (both clean and explicit), an iTunes-exclusive version with a bonus track (clean and explicit), four standard CD editions (each with a different cover, both clean and explicit), four vinyl LP editions (each with a different cover and colored vinyl) and a cassette tape.
Target also sold an exclusive “Lavender” edition of the album on CD and colored-vinyl LP, with the CD boasting three bonus tracks.
In addition, in the weeks leading up to release, Swift’s webstore sold pre-orders of signed copies of the four standard CD albums and the four standard vinyl LPs. Midnights was also available in deluxe boxed set with a CD edition of the album and a Swift-branded T-shirt, exclusively for Capital One cardholders.
Three hours after Midnights arrived, Swift issued a deluxe edition of the album with seven bonus songs (20 tracks total) to streaming services and digital retailers (with the latter including a digital liner notes booklet).
What else might Swift have up her sleeve during release week? As with most things in Swiftworld — only she knows for sure until it’s announced. What we do know — thanks to her sharing via social media – is that she’s slated to make an appearance on NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday (Oct. 24) and a second music video from the album will arrive on Tuesday (Oct. 25). Her social media calendar has also teased possible promotions or activations with Target on Saturday (Oct. 22) and independent record stores on Sunday.
Here’s a recap of the debut-week performances of Swift’s last five albums before Midnights and some of the marketing and promotional activations that fueled their arrivals on the chart.
Taylor Swift‘s Midnights has been out for less than 24 hours, and it has already broken a major record.
Spotify announced on Friday (Oct. 21) that Swift’s 10th studio LP is officially the most-streamed album in a single day in Spotify history. The “Lavender Haze” singer re-shared the news, writing, “How did I get this lucky, having you guys out here doing something this mind blowing?! Like what even just happened??!?!”
Swift’s 13-track album was accompanied by a 3am Edition that was released just a few hours later, making a total of 20 songs.
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“We lie awake in love and fear, in turmoil and in tears,” she 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.”
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.
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.
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“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.”
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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.