Taylor Swift’s Best Skill Is MIA on 'Midnights'
Diagnosing how the singer ended up making an album that's just ok.
I’m not going to beat around the bush or come up with some clever intro for this edition of Cansler Culture. I’m just going to say it:
Taylor Swift’s new album is just OK.
There are a lot of things to like about “Midnights,” which came out a couple weeks ago. There are also a lot of things to dislike. But at the end of the day, the truth that we (I) have to reckon with is that an artist who had previously released nine albums that were all at the very least Good has released an album that is less than Good.
Over the past two weeks, plenty of critics and writers — at least the ones who didn’t call the album an “instant classic” to drive up page views — have attempted to diagnose what isn’t working on “Midnights.” There’s the fact that Swift is mostly rehashing already-settled personal drama. There’s the clunky lyrics that pop up at least once on each song. There’s the production by Jack Antonoff, who is perhaps too good at creating a cohesive vibe here.
All of these are true, but what really holds “Midnights” back from being as effective as Swift’s prior work is that her strongest skill — a skill which she has carried with her all the way from her country-twang days back in 2006 to her pseudo-acoustic pandemic albums in 2020 — is mysteriously missing-in-action on “Midnights.”
From the beginning, Taylor Swift has always been a storyteller. It’s in her roots, of course — creating a narrative arc through a song is a staple in country music — but she’s also found enormous success carrying over that ability into her explorations in pop and indie music. It was fitting, in retrospect, that her first major crossover hit was “Love Story,” a twist on “Romeo and Juliet” with a clear three-act structure. She combined storybook lyrics, a country twang, and a pop hook and a hit was born.
What makes her lyricism so effective, though, is not just that she tells stories. It’s how she does so. Swift has a unique talent for distilling moments — real or fictional — into concise and evocative lyrics that conjure specific images in the listener’s mind.
Put simply, her best lyrics are cinematic in a way that few artists are capable of.
I use the term “cinematic” very specifically because of the filmmaking principle that the most compelling films strip away all the information — emotional or expository — that isn’t necessary for the story to be effective. There’s a reason filmmakers are told to “show, don’t tell.”
What Swift does in her best work is apply the language of cinema to her lyricism. Consider her magnum opus, “All Too Well.” There’s a simplicity to lyrics like “We're singing in the car, getting lost upstate / Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place / And I can picture it after all these days.” It gives very little detail, but it tells the listener so much.
She takes that concision even further on a song like “august,” where she creates stirring imagery in extremely few words:
Salt air, and the rust on your door I never needed anything more Whispers of “are you sure?” “Never have I ever before”
To be clear, it’s not just that Swift’s lyrics happen to have this cinematic quality. It’s a purposeful technique, as made clear by her own references within songs to the film-like features. You can hear it on her 2014 hit “Style,” where she begins the song with a wide shot to set the scene: “Midnight. You come and pick me up. No headlights.” and then follows that up with a cut to the main characters. “Fade into view,” she sings. “It’s been a while since I have even heard from you.”
To be sure, Swift doesn’t employ storytelling or cinematic lyricism all the time, and it’s certainly not her only talent, but it’s a trait that is present on all of her best work, and all of her albums have at least a handful of songs that are particularly effective because of this specific skill.
All of her albums, that is, except “Midnights.”
On this new album, her lyrics are uncharacteristically blunt. Multiple critics have likened the writing style to that of a therapy session — Swift is self-aware, but also direct. She doesn’t paint a picture that reveals her emotions. She just tells us how she’s feeling.
Rayne Fisher-Quann put it best in her review: “This of-the-moment therapy-speak is a classic example of telling, not showing, and it’s a stylistic departure for Swift that gets in the way of what her songwriting has always done best: getting us to feel her emotions right along with her.”
Take the song “Anti-Hero,” for example. It’s one of the better songs on the album, and a line like “I should not be left to my own devices / They come with prices and vices / I end up in crises” might be poetic in other ways, but isn’t particularly evocative. (Don’t even get me started on the abysmal “Sometimes it feels like everyone else is a sexy baby / And I’m the monster on the hill”).
None of this is to say that evocative lyrics are nowhere to be found on “Midnights.” They’re there in bits and pieces, but still, her imagery is rarely as concise as it’s been in the past.
Often, too, the most cinematic lyrics have other issues that hold them back from being as effective as they could be. On “Maroon,” she sings “‘How'd we end up on the floor anyway?’ you say / ‘Your roommate's cheap-ass screw-top rosé, that's how’ / I see you every day now.” Those lyrics could be great, but she sings the syllables with odd emphasis that pulls attention away from the words. It doesn’t help that Antonoff steeps the vocals in production that washes away the lyrics.
Of course, Swift has enough other talents that there are still a handful of songs on “Midnights” that are at least Good, but without strong imagery that burns itself in your brain, what you end up with here is an album that is largely forgettable.
That’s a new feeling for a Swift album. Hopefully, it stays a new feeling.
That’s all for this edition of Cansler Culture, the newsletter that just hit its one-year anniversary. Shoutout to everyone who still reads this even though I stopped putting in cocktail recipes. Maybe I’ll bring it back.
the first time I heard 'paris' I thought she was saying "we wear sombreros" and i was like why would she do that?
sometimes it DOES feel like everyone else is a sexy baby