The result is a collection that feels more experimental, as if Swift was deliberately noodling with rawer ideas. Unlike those first 13 songs, for which she enlisted the producer Jack Antonoff, three of the bonus songs feature the stylings of Aaron Dessner, Swift’s main collaborator on Folklore and Evermore. Thematically, the lyrics fit the LP’s concept of what keeps Swift up at night, but the songs are structurally more complex than the initial batch of tracks. But despite their relative invisibility and muted debut, they’re the best songs from her Midnights era thus far.Ĭatchy and cathartic, soulful and snarky, the 3am edition of Midnights may as well be a separate album. None of them made it onto Billboard’s top 10. None of them is available to purchase physically. None of them appears to have been sent to critics in advance, which meant they were largely ignored in initial reviews.
A few hours after the standard version of Midnights hit airwaves, she released seven bonus songs she called the “3am tracks” as a surprise, writing in an Instagram post, “Lately I’ve been loving the feeling of sharing more of our creative process with you.” Written during the making of Midnights, the additional tunes are less polished than her singles. Read: The beautiful banality of Taylor Swift’s MidnightsĪnd yet, her most effective scheme may be the surprise she saved for her most ardent fans. As a result, Swift’s 10th studio effort topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart this week, with songs from the album occupying all of the top 10 slots-making Swift the first artist to do so in history. The strategy worked: When Midnights arrived, cresting on hype, listeners absorbed the album in full, spreading out the streams among its 13 tracks. And she didn’t release a single until the night the album dropped. She sold multiple versions of the vinyl, encouraging fans to collect them all to form a clock. She put together a “manifest” that looked like something out of the metaverse. Over the course of nearly two months, she posted cryptic videos teasing the music without allowing anyone to hear a single note. The song is addressed to her lover, but she might as well be singing about the meticulous rollout of her new album. In the final track of Midnights, Taylor Swift confesses to being a “mastermind” who plans so carefully that she can’t possibly lose.
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