“I should not be left to my own devices,” Taylor Swift proclaims on self-excoriating new song Anti-Hero, laying out reasons: “They come with prices and vices, I end up in crisis.”
She wallows in depression, calls herself a monster, and wittily worries about “covert narcissism I disguise as altruism like
The chorus opens with the line: “I’m the problem, it’s me” albeit a perky melody implies that she may not be entirely serious.
To be fair, it must be quite hard work being Taylor Swift. The singer-songwriter superstar is almost ridiculously prolific. Still only 32 years old (a year older than Ed Sheeran, two years younger than Adele) Midnights is officially her 10th album but also her sixth major release in the past four years (including two early albums she completely re-recorded for copyright reasons).
Every release is preceded by elaborate marketing campaigns, over which Swift presides with the fastidious attention to detail and quality control that has marked every step of her rise from country ingenue to global brand.
On the playful Mastermind, Swift exults in her capacity for planning: "I laid the groundwork / And then just like clockwork / The dominoes cascaded in line … it was all by design."
Yet even in jest she roots such controlling impulses in unhappiness: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid / So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since.”
Swift locked into her devoted audience as an astutely observational chronicler of the inner life of young women asserting their right for love and respect in a male-dominated world.
With an instinct for mainstream songcraft reliant on the kind of meaningful lyrics and catchy melodies that have prevailed against all the changing tides of musical fashion, Swift has been a key figure in the rise of the female voice in 21st-century pop.
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Advertise with NZME.Her source material has often been implicitly autobiographical, although the fact that she has been in a steady relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn for six years presumably provides its own challenges for songcraft rooted in everyday tales of dating, promiscuity, love and heartbreak.
She has outlined her concept for Midnights as "stories of 13 sleepless nights", and, indeed, the 13 songs are plagued by insecurities, racked with doubts about her chosen path, or circling around memories replete with regrets.
But it is not quite blood on the tracks the overall tone is light, as if Swift is trying out different aspects of her personality at one remove from the rawness of the emotional content.
The songs are strong. Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that Swift has never written a bad song, although (for all her stylistic adventuring) she has very identifiable formats involving breathless cascades of rhymes delivered on the turn of each chord change in modulating two or three note cadences.
Midnights pivots back towards mainstream pop following the analogue Americana of her more reflective pandemic albums, Folklore and Evermore.
Still working primarily with ubiquitous writer-producer Jack Antonoff (Lorde, St Vincent, Florence & the Machine), it has a sensuous electro-digital sound, yet despite the Prince-like falsetto funkiness of opening love song Lavender Haze and glib strut of Bejeweled ("When I walk in a room, I can still make the whole place shimmer") there are no obvious chart-smashing bangers. It is almost as if she has become too mature for the brand of meme-friendly, earworm pop with which she made her name.
A duet with Lana Del Rey (another Antonoff client) on co-written ballad Snow On The Beach suggests the two are in danger of becoming interchangeable, sophisticated purveyors of ironically self-aware songcraft with sonically adventurous edges.
More interesting is the moody Midnight Rain, on which Swift's voice is pitch-shifted low so that she sounds masculine singing the refrain (a trick employed several times throughout the album).
“He wanted it comfortable / I wanted that pain,” is the hook, on which Swift wrestles with the ruthlessness and ambition that doomed a young love affair. “I was making my own name / Chasing the fame / He stayed the same / All of me changed.”
She looks back sympathetically on the neuroses and romantic illusions of that younger self on You're on Your Own, Kid: "I gave my blood, sweat and tears for this / I hosted parties and starved my body / Like I'd be saved by the perfect kiss."
Swift fans will love this album, which offers an array of insights into their heroine crafted as clever pop songs. Yet it also suggests an artist betwixt and between, uncertain whether to press deeper into intimate songcraft or restart a commercial juggernaut.
A singer-songwriter who has thrived writing about crisis and conflict in her love life, Swift now finds herself negotiating domestic contentment. It is a dilemma that gives the album its best song, Sweet Nothing, representing Swift at her least dramatic, a gossamer-light, flyaway ballad on which she sounds like she's not trying too hard to craft something clever or commercial, just to tell it as it is.
“Industry disruptors and soul deconstructors / And smooth-talking hucksters / Out glad-handing each other / And the voices that implore / ‘You should be doing more’ / To you I can admit / That I’m just too soft for all of it.”
Midnights represents Swift at a turning point. I am not sure if it is the sign of a curtain falling on her imperial phase or a new pop dawn.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
