Script about the Midnights album that I wrote at midnight because no one will stop me

When Midnights first came out, the general consensus seemed to be… “mid-nights,” indeed. Don’t get me wrong, people loved the album. But given the high bar for Taylor’s songwriting, and the huge departure this era was sonically from Folklore and Evermore, Midnights didn’t seem to be the next magnum opus we’d all been hoping for. I can only speak for myself when I say that while I did enjoy Midnights, it wasn’t my favorite Taylor Swift album.

I adored the concept of reflecting on thirteen sleepless nights throughout your life; stories of “self-loathing, revenge fantasies, what could’ve been, falling in love, and falling apart.” Going back through each of her eras, and digging into them with the wisdom gained from further experience, even if it means further tearing at old wounds. Both an insightful introspection, and a dangerous rumination.

Even the concept of the 3 a.m. tracks, deeper into the night when you still haven’t managed to fall asleep, felt brilliant. It really drove home this vibe of past traumas gnawing at you until you’d faced them head on. But… something felt like it was missing. Previous eras usually accompanied major events in Taylor’s life. Personally, I feel kinda icky with how much we know about her personal life through media vultures and the dehumanization of celebrities (go watch Shanspeare’s video on that, it’s great), but this information does help to empathize with how she uses her songwriting to transform her experiences into art.

Which, ain’t that one of the main reasons why artists create in the first place? As a means of self-reflection, and even self-therapy? Understanding these things and empathizing with the artist can help you better analyze their work, provided you’re not falling into parasocial delusions of stanning them to the point of putting them on a pedestal and white knighting them at every turn… if you know you know.

But that was perhaps what felt a bit off about Midnights when it first released. As far as we knew, Taylor had been in a loving, committed relationship with actor (and professional London Boy) Joe Alwyn, and presumably wrote up to four albums either about their relationship, or referencing it. Fuck, they’d even written several songs together on Folklore and Evermore: “champagne problems,” “exile,” “coney island,” and the title track “evermore.” For these, Joe used the pen name William Bowery, assumedly for privacy… this will be relevant later.

See, to understand this, we need to go back to the terrible, no good time of 2016, a.k.a. When some fuckwit read the Necronomicon and opened the floodgates of hell, causing the world to fall into a downward spiral that we’re still not out of. Whoever you are, I hope a deadite got you. I won’t harp on it for too long, but basically, the entire world fucking hated Taylor Swift and called her a snake, and she went “Fuck all y’all, I am removing myself from this narrative,” and then went into hiding… for like a whole year.

One of the reasons which is relevant to today’s video of why Taylor got dogpiled was because… she dated like a normal person. She’s always written candidly about her relationships. She never actually namedrops them - except for human trash can John Mayer - instead speaking about them through the stories she tells in her songs. The only reason we’re able to know who she’s talking about is because of how publicized most of her relationships have always been, and hoo boi, the slut shaming that ensued.

Firstly, she was often criticized for the number of men she dated, and how quickly it seemed she moved between relationships. Which… is that your business though? Yes, it’s important to take time after a breakup to heal and reflect, but also, you never know what someone else is thinking or dealing with, nor how they’re handling a situation—especially when it’s a celebrity you’ve never, nor will ever, meet and know on a personal level.

And secondly, art is a form of self-expression, and that naturally means your experiences are going to become the basis of your work, or at least will inform how you go about it. Most artists discuss love because it’s considered to be the most universal human emotion. Love songs tend to be the breakout hits for a reason, and so it’s kinda odd to single out Taylor for writing about her lovers and exes when everyone else does it too. The only reason I can think of her being singled out is because of the high levels of clarity and sincerity in her storytelling.

Enter Reputation, a superficially dark and edgy EDM album all about her comeback, where she usurps the throne of the Snake Queen and declares war on all who’ve wronged her. It’s leaning into a caricature created for her by the media and public, the same way she leaned into the image of the man-obsessed, Machiavelian lunatic in “Blank Space.” And of course, that facade melts away as the album continues, revealing Reputation to actually be an album about the love she found during her exile: the one with Joe.

It’s one of my favorite albums from her. A story about both reclaiming your power, and in a way, stepping into it for the first time. It was very much a rebirth for Taylor, letting go of this need to be loved and validated by the masses, and instead focusing on herself and her own happiness. The second half of the album is all about the unexpected, enthralling, and delicate relationship she forged with Joe, ultimately wanting to keep it out of the public eye as much as she could.

Lover followed immediately after, ditching Reputation’s darker mood and aesthetic, and switching it out for purple-pink, cotton candy skies for a more upbeat and domestic feeling. It’s definitely one of her more underrated albums. And put quite simply, it’s Taylor returning to form and gushing about this cute London Boy who showed her love is gold, like daylight.

Folklore and Evermore, at least to me, are basically the same era: indie folk records purportedly about fictional stories and characters, as opposed to the rest of Taylor’s autobiographical catalog… and yes, this is my favorite era from her. Created and released in 2020, in the peak of the pandemic, these albums deal a lot with grief, trauma, love, regrets, innocence—the whole range of human emotion. And though these stories are supposedly fictional, it’s worth remembering that all fiction is inspired by at least a fragment of the creator’s real-world experiences.

All of these eras form what I like to call… the Daylight Saga (yes I just came up with that now as I wrote the script). They’re about the period of time following Taylor’s return she spent with Joe Alwyn, focused on this one private, seemingly perfect relationship. Taylor had found her power, she’d found her man, and now she could move on to bigger and better things, stretching out this happy ending into infinity.

But then… Midnights happened.

Midnights, as we know it now, ends the Daylight Saga, which aesthetically I find fitting as fuck. But it does admittedly feel a bit odd, having the last few albums be so wise, content, and introspective, and then going to this one which feels so… melancholic. It’s not outright depressing or dark, but there’s this twinge of sadness and defeat running through all of the tracks, even the superficially happier ones. Most of that is thanks to the hazy, almost dreamy use of synths and voice production, which fits the vibe of a sleepless night of rumination.

The standard album ends with “Mastermind,” which feels a bit off as a happy ending to this story of reflecting on your past wounds to trace how you got to where you are now. It’s admitting to this deep desire to be loved that goes all the way back to childhood, and therefore learning to plot and scheme so as to worm your way into people’s hearts. “To make them love [you], and make it seem effortless.” Fellow chronic and/or recovering people pleasers, I know you feel attacked and/or seen, and that is the point.

“Mastermind” wants you to feel like the story is over. The narrator has crafted the perfect story for themselves, you’ve bought into it, and so have they. Things are as they should be… except, they’re not. The true ending comes on the 3 a.m. edition, later into the night when the mask of “Mastermind” is removed, revealing the shambling, lonely, conflicted face of “Dear Reader.”

“Dear Reader” is absolutely one of my favorite songs off the album. It’s, as the name suggests, framed as the narrator giving the listener bits of advice. The only thing is some of that advice is kinda terrible, and the narrator admits that. The chorus repeats, “Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart,” and the full breakdown in the bridge reveals that the narrator has been plagued by things beyond their control. They keep giving advice they know they aren’t taking themselves, almost in a desperate bid to remain in control of the narrative they know isn’t true. “You should find another guiding light, but I shine so bright.”

The 3 a.m. edition wasn’t my favorite thing at first, but it grew on me, to the point I can’t listen to the standard edition by itself. For a long while, I couldn’t really put my finger on why “Dear Reader” felt like the true ending to Midnights. But then… April came. And she took all of our kneecaps in a single, swift swing.

To say that the confusion as to why Taylor and Joe had broken up sent Swifties into a collective spiral of parasocial heartbreak would be… an understatement. As a fandom, we got invested as fuck into this relationship we had no part in. And to break that down, you really have to work on an individual level for every person, and we ain’t got time for that mess. But we did definitely buy into this narrative of Taylor getting her happy ending after enduring horrible circumstances, and by extension, perhaps believed in this narrative for ourselves.

And perhaps that’s why it felt so awful to have that belief torn away from us. To have that notion of a secure happy ending—not a romanticized fairy tale she’d spin from earlier eras, but a more grounded, mature, domestic one—taken away. Now again, it’s none of our fucking business what these two grown-ass people went through, so I’m gonna do my best to just focus on this from a music and storytelling level. And to do this, we need two Midnights songs in particular: “Hits Different,” which only recently came to streaming on the ‘Til Dawn Edition; and the CD-exclusive Midnights Vault Track, “You’re Losing Me.”

Both of these are broken down by Emily and Bonny from Chats and Reacts, perhaps the most well-known and professional Swifties on the damn internet. Highly recommend their breakdowns in general, as they do a wonderful job dissecting Taylor’s songwriting and lyric choices, and they’re also fun as hell to listen to. And they’re also the reason “superior” and “illegal” have corrupted my lexicon, so… gotta show the gratitude here.

But it’s with these songs that the entire Midnights era comes into clearer focus. “Hits Different” is quite possibly one of the most upbeat, confident breakup songs I’ve ever heard. This shit is such a sad bop that I’m alarmed which how perfectly tailored it is to me (and yes, I did mean that pun). Though the narrator is used to loves burning out and failing, then jumping to the next relationship, this time is different. It’s harder for them to recover from this heartbreak, to the point where it really feels like love is a fucking lie. Cuz if it wasn’t real with you, then how can it be real with anyone?

“You’re Losing Me,” meanwhile, isn’t exactly a breakup song. It’s in the final stage of the relationship, where the narrator realizes things aren’t working anymore, and the end is in sight. It’s inescapable. It’s a painful admission to all the problems festering within the relationship that have given rise to deep, unrelenting resentment. It’s begging to be seen by a partner who just hasn’t been choosing you for a long time, with a somber acknowledgment of how your heart no longer starts for them. Any kind of love you had for them is now buried under all that resentment.

The narrator admits in “Dear Reader” that they prefer hiding in plain sight, and that holds true for this entire era’s story. All along, Midnights was the slow realization that the happy ending you thought you’d secured actually wasn’t what you thought it was, and is now crumbling quickly beneath your feet. In your attempt to salvage it, you dig through your past to uncover where you’ve gone wrong in previous relationships, hoping to find a clue as to what’s going wrong.

But the thing is, as much as you hope you’ll find a way to save it… you’re more than likely going to find answers you don’t like. And that’s the reason why evolving as a person fucking sucks. Doing the work involves facing the darkest parts of yourself in brutal honesty, which can feel absolutely humiliating at best, and soul shattering at worst. It can feel like you’re destroying your world as you move the bricks one at a time, waiting for the house you built to crash down on you just to get the pain over with. In the words of the wise SZA, “trying to find deeper meaning in nonsense. Trying to grow without hating the process.”

Admitting that a long-term relationship isn’t working anymore is not easy. There’s a level of comfort and security in it, even if it’s miserable, and the thought of leaving it is terrifying. Especially when the entire world is invested in it, and there’s plenty of people just waiting to go, “I knew she’d go right back to going through men like a train.”

Hardly anyone is excited at leaping into the unknown, especially when what they’ve created has served as a decently functioning bastion for so long. But much of this is born of the sunk-cost fallacy: a belief that because you’ve spent so long with something, or someone, it’s better to stick it out to the bitter end than to walk away. Except we all know… “Sometimes walking out is the one thing that will find you the right thing.”

It can feel defeating to admit that the happy ending you thought you’d reached wasn’t all you’d thought it was. To think you’re so close to finally reaching the summit, only to realize you’ve still got a long way to go, and a long way to fall. You feel like a fool. Like a charlatan, and like the imposter your demons whispered you were all along. But you’re none of those things: you’re just a person who’s doing their best, and is trying to navigate the world the best they can with a broken compass and a torn-up, probably outdated map.

Even if it feels like your world is ending, it’s not. Taylor mentions in the Long Pond documentary about how at times, it’s felt like her life methodically came undone, and she couldn’t stop it no matter how hard she tried. But in a way, it was needed to push her into a new direction so she could grow and become who she needed to be. Or at the very least, she took the horrible things she went through, and used them to make herself stronger. And in a way, that’s what Midnights is all about. It’s taking all these traumas, these things that have haunted you all your life, and saying, “I survived all of that, and I will survive this too.”

In a way, it’s even made me appreciate “You’re On Your Own, Kid” a lot more. Though the relationship informing the Daylight Saga is often credited as having saved Taylor, she in fact saved herself, and that relationship was more of a catalyst… or maybe inciting incident? At the very least it was a nice bonus for a time. The point is, even if you feel like you feel utterly alone, you aren’t. You always have the power to redefine your relationship with yourself. You decide what you’re deserving of, and to again quote SZA, “what demons you digest.”

As you do the work, sometimes you discover you’ve been the anti-hero all along, or even the villain. Maybe you were so caught up in the lavender haze, you didn’t even think to question whether or not your fantasy lined up with reality. Maybe you’ve lost the thread guiding you through the labyrinth, and now you sit there in shock, wondering how you’ll ever be found again. But whatever the case, wherever you’ve been, you’re still carrying every version of yourself with you. You are still able to be there for yourself when no one else can be. And when you choose yourself, you might even find you’re finally able to drift off to a peaceful sleep.

The bed might feel a bit colder now. Maybe you don’t have someone else there to comfort you, or to cuddle with, or to envision a future with. But you do still have yourself, and maybe that’s all you ever needed.