A pop-music mastermind returns
Taylor Swift’s pin-sharp new album, “Midnights,” closes with a song in which the pop superstar patiently explains to someone — perhaps many millions of someones — that their intimate relationship wasn’t a product of kismet but of design.
“I laid the groundwork,” she sings over a blippy electronic groove, her voice edging slightly ahead of the beat, “and then just like clockwork the dominoes cascaded in a line.” The tune is called “Mastermind,” which is what Swift calls herself in the chorus, neatly rhyming the word with “now you’re mine.”
Plenty of its characteristic detail can make you think she’s describing a romance. But “Mastermind” is also about Swift’s one-of-a-kind career — about the deliberation and the ingenuity of the moves that took the 32-year-old from being a teenage country phenom to one of the two or three biggest acts in all of music.
“No one wanted to play with me as a little kid,” she sings near the end of “Mastermind,”
which might be the saddest and funniest line on an LP teeming with both kinds, “so I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since to make them love me and make it seem effortless.” (Take a second to savor the intricate rhythm of those words before you’ve even heard them set to music.)
Pondering the delights and the anxieties of her own celebrity has been a hallmark of Swift’s work for years — or at least it was until 2020, when
she set aside much of the autobiographical life-of-a-pop-star stuff for the ostensibly fictional character-driven narratives of her twin pandemic albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.”
“Midnights,” her 10th studio full-length, returns to an earlier Swift mode in both sonic and lyrical terms: This 13-track set, which she produced with her longtime creative partner Jack Antonoff, feels like it picks up right where 2014’s “1989” and 2017’s “Reputation” left off, with slick, beat-heavy arrangements that seem dimly aware of hip-hop’s existence and with lyrics peppered with juicy allusions to Swift’s various high-profile feuds and love affairs.
The album opens with the steamy, R&b-adjacent “Lavender Haze,” in which Swift laments the scrutiny she’s under as a famous person dating another famous person (in her case, the English actor Joe Alwyn); the song — cowritten by and featuring background vocals from the actress Zoë Kravitz — seeks a safe space removed from a realm where her loose talk threatens to “go viral.” In “Anti-hero,” over Antonoff ’s buzzing synths and booming ’80s-rock drums, she weighs the public’s harshest opinions of her, copping to a “covert narcissism” and admitting that sometimes she feels like “a monster on the hill … slowly lurching toward your favorite city.”
Swift’s storytelling impulse isn’t dead on “Midnights,” which she’s said grew out of her bent toward wee-hours contemplation. “Midnight Rain,” a slow and woozy number with pitch-shifted vocals, narrates a tale of a guy and a girl with differing life goals, neither of whom appear to be Swift or Alwyn; ditto “Maroon,” in which the guy and girl get drunk off her roommate’s “cheap-ass screw-top rosé.”
Yet the songwriting and the vocal performances here are so strong — she’s playing with cadence and emphasizing the grain of her voice like never before — that eventually you stop caring what’s drawn directly from Swift’s real life and what’s not. It’s just a pleasure to get lost in tunes like “Labyrinth,” in which the singer explores her fear of falling in love again, and “Snow on the Beach,” a gorgeous duet with Lana Del Rey.