Taylor Swift’s New Album

By Julia Duran

On August 28th, during the VMA’s, Taylor Swift announced her 10th studio album named Midnights. The album will be released on October 21st this year. This might be her 10th album, but she is in the process of re-recording her first 6 albums. This is due to the fact that her old label, Big Machine Records, sold the masters of her originals to Scooter Braun. This caused all the money that Taylor was earning to go to Braun. She began her project on re-recording the albums sold, and named it “Taylor’s Version”. So far she has released two Taylors Versions: Fearless and Red.

Taylor is known for her easter eggs and clues found on her Instagram, @taylorswift. Some of her first clues date back to the release of her first album. She even started planning some of them three years in advance. This newest album has been full of easter eggs and clues. First off, it’s a well known fact to all of Taylor’s fans that her favorite and lucky number is 13. 13 years ago Kanye interrupted her speech, for accepting the Best Female Video Award for “You Belong With Me” and said Beyonce should have won. Over the years their feud has been a topic of many interviews and questions to Taylor, Kanye, and their close friends and family. As she went to accept her award for Best Female Video Award for “All Too Well: The Short Film” this year, she announced that she would be releasing her new album Midnights and its release date, Oct 21, is not only the release date, but also the birthday of Kanye’s ex wife, Kim Kardashian, who has been seen trash talking Taylor. The dress Taylor wore at the VMAs this year was very similar to the one she wore in the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video, which is a direct response to Kim and Kanye after they leaked a phone call between them and Taylor. The dress in the music video was already an homage to the dress she wore to the VMAs in 2009 when the feud started.

This album has 13 tracks on the album; speculated to be a sister of Lover, which was released in 2019. She almost called Lover “Daylight” which is the final track on the lover album. She changed the name because: “I felt like that was a little too on the nose because Reputation was such a dark, like evening-nighttime-city album, and I thought that calling the next album Daylight would be too obvious and it’s such a love album.” Fans think that the name of this new album is connected to Lover because there was a theory that it had a side b, the back of an album, which was going to be ‘Blue’. She ends the album with the song “Daylight”, and the last lyrics of the song are, “the things that haunt me in the middle of the night”. Now, three years later, she’s releasing the album Midnights which is about the things that haunt her in the middle of the night. Another thing that was pointed out that aids this theory is that the cover art for Midnights looks like it should be the back of an album cover, since it has the track list on it. They also think that this album was supposed to be released after Lover because her two recent albums weren’t planned. Evermore and Folklore were a result of Covid-19.

Taylor has been leaving clues for longer than we think. On May 5th, she tweeted to Jenny Han and thanked her for using her new version of “This Love”. “Thank you @jennyhan for debuting my version of This Love in the trailer for @thesummeriturnedpretty!! I’ve always been so proud of this song and I’m very 🥺🥺🥺 about this turn of events – This Love (Taylor’s Version) comes out tonight at m i d n i g h t!” Most fans believed she was releasing a rerecording of her album 1989, but she was just spelling out the name for her new album. She left another hint, but this one was in 2020. It was not pointed out until she called her new album, “the sleepless nights chapter”, but a fan noticed that she made a playlist for her album folklore, and named it the same thing.