New Rockstars

After three full listens of Midnights, the new album by Taylor Swift, I couldn’t stop thinking of Spider-Man.

In the climax of SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, there’s scene where (SPOILER) Andrew Garfield’s Spidey (reprising his role from The Amazing Spider-Man series) leaps from the Statute of Liberty to save Zendaya’s MJ. The scene, on its own, is thrilling. But the scene hits harder for Spidey fans that have followed the character across numerous reboots because it echoes a similar daring rescue from the second Amazing films in which the same move accidentally kills his girlfriend. The No Way Home rescue serves as catharsis not only for the character, but gives Garfield a chance to “tie up loose ends” with his character and bring a feeling a closure to the actor and audience at the same time.

The callback helps elevate the scene, rewarding viewers for tirelessly consuming movies, reaction podcasts, explainer videos, and comic source material. Decades of fandom building to a singular payoff. At this point, Marvel has become a, pardon the pun, tangled web, with each film and episode building to what’s next - making it almost impossible to evaluate each installment on its own merits. Was DOCTOR STRANGE AND THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS a “good” movie? It was not. Was it essential viewing for context for films and series to come? Based on the first few phases of MCU films, most likely. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, any throw-away line of dialogue or Easter egg could resurface years down the road - and an entire cottage industry has been born to breathlessly capture them all and speculate about what they might mean for the future.

Easter eggs and coded messages to fan have long been part of the Taylor Swift experience, going back to the Myspace days. CD booklets included seemingly random capital letters that helped spell out meaning and insight about the songs. The run-up to Midnights was no different, as Swift logged on to TikTok to reveal the names of each track, always starting with the greeting “It’s me. Hi.”

So when Midnights dropped at midnight on Friday, October 21, the TikTok greeting revealed itself as the chorus on the album’s first single, “Anti-Hero.” But the Easter eggs didn’t stop there. Every song on the album seemed to have a reference to a Taylor of the past. The aforementioned “It's me, Hi, I'm the problem. It's me” lyric recalls the “you, that's what happened, you” lyric from the 10-minute version of “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version).” Sonically, several of the songs seemed to be extensions of previous sounds and themes explored in earlier pop albums. “Midnight Rain” has a similar beat to Reputation stand-out “Dress.” Some of the similarities could be chalked up to the fact that Midnights is produced by frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff, but as Swift reminds us on “Mastermind,” the final (official) album track, “none of it was accidental.” (Note: for a much better deep-dive on the lyrical and musical echoes, check out the wonderful Midnights episode of “Every Single Album,” hosted Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard)

But it is good, though? The album certainly adheres to the concept (“the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” Swift said in the album announcement) and the album is sequenced that propels listeners through the album’s brisk 44 minute run time. Lyrically, however, the album struggles to hold itself together. My friends and I used to have a running joke around previous Swift releases about which lyrics would be the most used on Instagram captions. But what happens when no one posts to the Instagram feed anymore? Midnights suggest that Swift, when left to her own devices, flips the script and makes the Easter eggs the backbone of the art, rather than the marketing vehicle.

Did the “Breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out” lyrics in “Labirynth” sound vaguely familiar? Or the “you’re on your own” from the album’s fifth track, “You’re On Your Own, Kid?” That’s because they were referenced in her 2022 commencement speech at NYU. Is “Vigilante Shit” about her feud with Kanye West or her feud with Scooter Braun? Is the line “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby” a reference to a joke in 30 Rock, or an extension of the metaphor of Swift as a Godzilla/King Kong monster lumbering to your town? Does either interpretation really make sense? And could anyone pull off a line like “karma is a cat/Purring in my lap 'cause it loves me” besides renowned cat lover Swift? Probably not.

Ultimately Midnights succeeds despite its barrage of Easter eggs and references. Secretly, I wished the album ended on “Labirynth,” which feels like a perfect album closer - but the album feels destined to have thirteen tracks (13, of course, being Swift’s lucky number). Maybe Midnights is what she’s being building towards this whole time - her (to borrow from the Avengers title and her Reputation track) “Endgame.” Swift remains is a singular talent who can craft a perfect pop confection. I just hope future releases are more marvel and less Marvel.