This Friday will be like it always is with her. From midnight onwards, the streaming service servers around the world will groan, the number of clicks for songs like “Lavender Haze” and “Karma” will be in the millions in a matter of minutes. Anyone who still listens to old-fashioned music on CD or vinyl will besiege the shops wherever possible. Appropriately, the new album is called “Midnights” and, as Taylor Swift says, was created song by song in 13 sleepless nights. First impression after the few song samples that could be heard beforehand: “Midnights” has become a very earthy and powerful album.
Unsurprisingly, there are some stalwarts in the music star business in the likes of Harry Styles, Beyoncé and Lizzo, but none quite as powerful as 32-year-old Swift, who Billboard magazine named “the biggest pop star of 2021.” . Why is that? Many things that can be summed up in one word: ability. Swift, who started out as a country singer, knows she needs to tell stories with her music. Stories about herself that she always wraps perfectly in country-pop-soul music and that fly from the concert stages and speakers so directly into the heads of her fans that they believe a friend is telling them her life story.
Swift has almost self-therapy with the way she sings on “Midnights.” She says she’s never delved into “my insecurities” in such detail before.
And so “Midnights”, created during the lockdown, could perhaps become the mood music of the year. If any pop superstar can pull something so heartfelt and believable, it’s only Taylor Swift.
