The song, named after an old-timey phrase coined for the feeling of falling in love (that, of course, Swift first heard on Mad Men) pairs nicely with the 1970s aesthetic of the album cover and visuals. The Midnights opener, “Lavender Haze,” is an intriguing amalgamation of time periods. Lucky for us all, things start strong and stay that way for a while. The uninspired production and uncharacteristically bland lyricism of Midnights are better left in the pages of a journal or lost in the shadow of a dream. The result is an atypical step backward, a record half-finished. But on Midnights, Swift is “out of the folklorian woods” (again, her own words) and back to the shiny, synthy poppiness of 2019’s Lover. On folklore and evermore, Swift so deftly melded her own experiences with fictional tales, while still creating affecting music that towered over the listener with irrefutable brilliance. Most things here feel like a first draft there’s a noticeable lack of connection between the emotions she’s feeling and what her audience is capable of absorbing. But the problem with repeating that word over and over is that it’s a constant reminder that, for songs written on or about emotionally fraught, sleepless nights, they lack poignancy and resonance. How appropriate: Midnights, by Swift’s accord, is “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout life.”Īnd in case you forget that the album is about midnights, she’ll remind you-several times throughout its runtime.
Instead, she teased out the album’s tracklist in TikTok videos and dropped easter eggs for loyalists to lose sleep over. In the two months after that announcement, fans waited on the eventual release of a lead single that never came. Taylor Swift is all big emotions and breathless declarations the human version of the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach right after sending a risky text.Ĭut to the night of the 2022 VMAs in August, when Swift surprise-announced her new record, Midnights, which was released Friday. Listen more closely, and the enormity of the lyrical worlds that Swift made her signature so long ago still remained. The songs on those two albums might have seemed smaller and more refined, but it was only because the poppiness that defined her post-2012 albums had been locked away. The world stops whenever her hand grabs the globe. Even the stripped-down, singer/songwriter folk of her pair of pandemic albums, folklore and evermore, was massive in scale Taylor Swift, the most popular artist in the world, had surprise-released two albums within six months. Taylor Swift is a maximalist at heart-she goes for broke every single time and milks everything for all it’s worth. That may seem like a stretch in a world where we have Gagas, Beyoncés, and Madonnas, but it’s true. Which allowed me to get a relatively clean copy of the song, with no dialogue and few sound effects.Believe it or not, Taylor Swift is our most grandiose pop star. And all those years ago, in September 2008, I was able to track down a copy of the episode with a 5.1 audio track with, thank the Lord, no dialogue in the left and right channels. It’s stripped down compared to the album version. That haste actually shows up in the version of the song heard in the episode. We recorded it right away, sent it off to them, and they put it in! Then they called and said they were very interested in the song. They said, “We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” For a while, we didn’t know if we were going to put it on the record because if it wasn’t going to be on the show, then we weren’t going to put it on the album. So, I played them “White Horse.” It was just me and my guitar and they freaked out. It would just be a dream come true to have a song on it. Then my agency out in LA set up a meeting with executive producers Betsy Beers and Shonda Rhimes at Grey’s Anatomy because that’s my favorite show.
I was going to wait for the third album because I really felt like we had the “sadness” represented on this record. I actually wasn’t going to put this song on the album. In fact, it appearing on the episode is the only reason it wasn’t held for her third album: While the album it was on, Fearless, came out in November, White Horse was introduced to the world two months earlier on the season 5 premiere of Grey’s Anatomy, one of Taylor’s favorite shows (her cat Meredith is named after the title character Meredith Grey). Let’s celebrate by going back to where the song began. The music video for Taylor’s song White Horse debuted 10 years ago yesterday.
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