Taylor has a handful of odd and specific recurring images in her lyrical repertoire. One is her fondness for very specific times (like 1:58 in “Last Kiss” or 8:05 in “Electric Touch”). My personal favorite, though, is “being sad in the hallway.” I would put its first appearance at Red in “The Moment I Knew,” though in a slightly altered form because the being sad actually happens in the bathroom, not the hallway:
But your close friends always seem to know
When there's something really wrong
So they follow me down the hall
And there in the bathroom
I try not to fall apart
Nevertheless, I do think this thinks counts as “being sad in the hallway” (partly because the appearance of “being sad in the hallway” in “coney island” calls back to this song a little). Taylor then retires this image for 1989, reputation, and Lover, but it comes back in “exile” (folklore) and “coney island” (evermore). On Midnights, we get ”Maroon” (“standing hollow-eyed in the hallway”) and then in subsequent editions there’s “You’re Losing Me” (“now you’re running down the hallway”).1
Obviously, I don’t believe Taylor is working out some kind of Primal Hallway Trauma. That should go without saying but I always feel like I have to say it.2 The emotional resonance of the hallway is pretty simple—when you’re in a hallway you’re going from one place to another, and you only hang out in a hallway if your plans to go somewhere else have been derailed or postponed in some way. So a hallway is an inherently sad location, because it’s always a place you’re moving through. It has no special draw of its own. It’s nobody’s favorite room. It’s not even really a room. What makes it interesting, as an image, is that she keeps going back to it.
It makes sense that Midnights ends up eventually featuring this image not once but twice since Midnights is ultimately a transitional album, and the insomnia it’s dedicated to is not unlike being stranded in the hallway. Between midnight and three am you can persuade yourself that sleep is coming eventually; once that clock hits three, though, you know you’re not sleeping. You’re just stuck here.
Midnights is probably the Taylor Swift album my opinion shifts about the most. It’s never quite in competition for the top three, but it’s usually on a journey back and forth from being one of her weaker albums to being a pretty good album. Right now my opinion is on the upswing as I’ve been listening to it a lot because—and this will sound like a joke but it’s actually true—one of the dogs really likes it. Like if it’s on and I leave the room and then come back, I’ll find him sitting attentively looking at the speaker or sleeping in front of it or whatever. It is the strangest thing. I don’t really know what to make of it. Does he just love the production of Jack Antonoff?
Anyway, that means I’ve been thinking a lot about it, so what follows is a somewhat unseasonable Midnights re-consideration. (I also filed a piece that is lightly related to Taylor, though not really about her, so she’s more-than-usually on my mind.3) I actually wanted to do something like this around the Grammys but then she announced a new album so I was like… never mind. So please enjoy some classic TSS overthinking, below.
I believe I’ve said this before, but I still think Midnights—by which I mean, the standard album, before the various “3AM” and “Til Dawn” and “Late Night” editions—is an album that’s about ambition before anything else. This theme is maybe clearest through the first six tracks, which begin with the theatrical declaration of not needing nothing but love that is “Lavender Haze,” the regret and loss of “Maroon,” the acidic levity of “Anti-Hero,” the swooning romanticism of “Snow on the Beach.”
Then you’ve got “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” with its plaintive initial portrait of its narrator as somebody who would’ve stayed (but “you never cared”), and which is followed (pointedly) by “Midnight Rain,” with its blunt “broke his heart ’cause he was nice.”4 That particular pivot feels fundamental to the whole album. Taylor the narrator loves love, but she loves something else more—writing music and (frankly) being famous.5
“Question…?” sees us return to slightly safer emotional territory (didn’t you ever wonder what it would have been like if we got together?). “Vigilante Shit” and “Bejeweled” brazen out feelings of betrayal and disappointment (and “Bejeweled” revisits the theme of loving something more than love). In “Labyrinth” Taylor gets vulnerable again, painting a relationship that is on the rocks but continually resuscitated; in “Karma” she gets cheeky and defiant. “Sweet Nothing” is a love song that is slightly ambiguous at its core (“all that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing”—is that a good or bad thing?), and then “Mastermind,” closing out the album, is triumphal: look, it all worked out.
That the standard Midnights album was almost immediately undermined by the addition of the 3 AM tracks indicates that “Mastermind” is not really intended to represent a final statement, and might indeed just be wishful thinking, sort of like when it’s 1:30 in the morning and you tell yourself you still have plenty of time to fall asleep. “Mastermind” functions as the more positive and romantic version of “Anti-Hero,” switching up the title we can apply to the cryptic and Machiavellian schemer. “Mastermind” ends with the promise of being recognized and loved for precisely that quality.6
3 AM is, as previously mentioned, the point when you admit to yourself you’re not falling asleep, and the seven 3 AM tracks are, I think, appropriately unhinged. Four of them (“Bigger Than The Whole Sky,” “Paris,” “Glitch,” “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve”) deal in counterfactuals, whereas on the main album, only “Question…?” really does.7 By the end of the album Taylor’s given herself the title “cursed man”—not an anti-hero, not a mastermind, just a drunk playing solitaire in an empty house (and losing). As in the music video for “Anti-Hero,” Taylor has reached a point where the only competitor and companion she really has is herself.
Taylor Swift’s life is the direct reflection of Taylor Swift’s choices, to a degree that is not true for most people and their choices. One of the things I appreciate about her music is the degree to which she knows that. She’s just honest about all of it when it comes to what she puts in the music. Midnights situations Taylor-the-narrator at a precipice: maybe you don’t want to marry this guy, maybe you can take it all back and tear it all down, or maybe you’re just doomed to sit up in the wee hours haunted by ghosts and what-ifs. But what you do know is that however it is you feel about it, you were the one who brought yourself here. Not somebody else.
“Having it both ways” is usually a criticism but I think it’s more or less what Taylor genuinely achieves when she writes about fame and ambition: it sucks but also she loves it. The takeaway from “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” is not that she hated doing the Eras tour, but that she works hard at creating “Taylor Swift” and she appreciates that her fans collaborate in this creation. When she zooms in on people in the crowd shouting “more!” or otherwise singing along in the music video, the idea isn’t that these people are ghouls but that her hard work is paying off. Everybody is playing their role here and everybody knows it’s a play. It is awful to go to work every day when all you want to do is cry in bed, even when your job is being Taylor Swift, but we all have to do it and here at least we can make it into a mutual game.
I think ambition is an underexplored topic, certainly in a lot of pop music (though not all), because it’s embarrassing. Yes, everybody at the top got there because they wanted it (if not only because they wanted it), but when you get there you’re supposed to be unbothered and relaxed. If you say “I want this” and you don’t get it, that’s bad, because it makes you look weak and a little pathetic. (Consider that story that goes around every year about Philip Roth waiting expectantly for his Nobel Prize.) If somebody wanted to write a modern recasting of a novel like Stendahl’s The Red and the Black, I suspect that what would be the hardest thing to translate into modern day terms is its hero’s naked social ambitions. Julien Sorel can’t be represented as some listless guy doing data entry and then going home to drink too much and play video games, even if his attempts at satisfying his ambitions end in disaster.
And rhetorically we often pay deference to the idea that what really matters in life are things that don’t have to do with work—family, whatever—even if we don’t actually act that way. So saying, as Taylor is willing to, that she walked away from a good thing because she was “chasing that fame”—these are things that I think you aren’t really supposed to say. Either the good thing was secretly bad or you get to Have It All. There aren’t supposed to be trade-offs at the level of Taylor Swift.
But on Midnights she’s saying you only get to a level like this through trade offs. “Everything you lose is a step you take” is another way of saying, everything comes at the cost of something else. Whether it was all worth it or not you’ll probably never know—even if you’re Taylor Swift. But you can acknowledge all of that and still say, in the end, you really don’t regret a thing.
While it’s a little different, I think “Hits Different” invokes “being sad in the hallway” when Taylor sings “I heard your key turn in the door down the hallway” because at this point we’re so primed to see hallways as sad. Also, as my friend Olivia points out, “champagne problem” invokes “being sad in a liminal space” (the train and the landing).
If you were looking for a real-life reference point for her hallway imagery, a more likely guess is that it probably has more to do with the fact that she watches a lot of Grey’s Anatomy—a show I have never seen but which I would almost bet money features a lot of dramatic hallway running. However, I don’t have any money to bet because I spent it all on perfume samples.
Assuming it comes out the people at r/fauxmoi are gonna get mad at me again.
Very similar swing from “Peter” to “The Bolter” on Tortured Poets.
i.e. “I miss you… but I miss sparkling” in “Bejeweled.”
And Taylor Swift is recognized and loved for those qualities… by her fans.
I think you could make an argument that “High Infidelity” and “The Great War” are also counterfactual songs in spirit—but I’m not going to—you just could. (I’m still convinced “High Infidelity” is mostly about her fans / the press—“dragged my feet right down the aisle” fits pretty well with “all they keep asking me is if I’m gonna be your bride” from “Lavender Haze.”)
love this! my other current favorite taylor motif is everything dealing w/ the cosmos. I've mainly only been thinking about it on TTPD, but I'm sure there's cosmic imagery in older eras
I always get so excited to see a new Taylor Swift Studies post!
I completely agree about the idea of the 3am tracks making “Mastermind” less of an impactful closing statement (which I think it is so perfect as), and everything you said about it. I wanted to ask you more about this section relating to your thoughts on the 3am edition:
“Four of them (“Bigger Than The Whole Sky,” “Paris,” “Glitch,” “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve”) deal in counterfactuals, whereas on the main album, only “Question…?” really does.”
This is such a fascinating point because these songs have always felt separate from so much else of midnights but I’ve never fully put a finger on why—do you think these songs are her most playing out the narrator’s what-ifs? Or do you say counterfactual as in they are experiences Taylor Swift the person hasn’t experienced?
The idea of counterfactuals also makes me think back to your TTP piece writing about the criticism of the music being too lore dependent when it’s actually just as rich and interesting (and maybe more so) when separate from the Tay-lore—do you apply the same framework to midnights?