In opening verse of Midnights1, Taylor sings: “And you don't really read into / my melancholia.” I’m so sorry Taylor, but I actually do. It’s my main hobby. I had to write a whole essay on it, unfortunately. In this essay, which you are reading, I aim to understand: what are the causes of the melancholy that permeates Midnights? What methods for soothing that melancholy does the album explore? What can these explorations offer us?
The album reckons with the pain and melancholy that comes with being a symbolic self. On Midnights, Taylor buckles under the weight of being Taylor. “Life’s emotionally abusive” she declares on “Snow on the Beach.”
Pain is created by the self, and the self is created by time and memory. These are the album’s central themes. The album explores the conditions which allow the self, as as a “symbolically mediated, temporally extended identity”2 to arise: memory and the continued cyclical passing of time. The album explores the counter-intuitive instinct to grasp at pain across time. Finally, it explores methods for momentary relief from the self. This is understood as equivalent to relief from pain itself.
First, let’s examine how Taylor understands time and how it constructs the conceptual self. Time is one of her core concerns on the album. I mean, she literally named the album after it. At Midnight, we find her still awake, pacing repetitive circles like the hands on a clock, greeting old depressions as they file back in for yet another graveyard shift. Time is repetitive, a source of recurring problematic patterns.
Taylor notices her patterns that she can’t help but keep re-enacting. “I’m the problem: it’s me,” she recognizes on “Anti-Hero.” Time moves on but the problems of the self don’t: “I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser.” She pleads that “I should not be left to my own devices ... / I end up in crisis (Tale as old as time).” Her self-inflicted problems recur throughout time, are “as old as time.” These repetition compulsions “describes the pattern whereby people endlessly repeat patterns of behaviour which were difficult or distressing in earlier life.”3 Same, Taylor. Same. These compulsions, then, are time acting on the self in ways that create pain. In “Snow on the Beach,” she concludes as much: “life is emotionally abusive / and time can't stop me quite like you did.”
On Midnights, time and the past can’t stop, and are compared to crypts that won’t close, cycles that won’t cease, as full of ghosts and weapons. In “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve: “I miss who I used to be / The tomb won't close.” She continues “now that I'm grown, I'm scared of ghosts / memories feel like weapons.” On “The Great War,” she continues: “maybe it's the past that's talking / screaming from the crypt / telling me to punish you for things you never did.” The past screams loudly on through the self. On “Mastermind” she really completes this Freudian circuit. She discusses the childhood traumas screaming from the crypt that lead to her compulsions: “no one wanted to play with me as a little kid / so I've been scheming like a criminal ever since / to make them love me.” Go off, Taylor. I mean, my favorite activity is having half a glass of wine and recounting old childhood traumas. Now I can do this while listening to Taylor do the same.
The past is a crypt that won’t close, but so is the future. It remains open and uncertain. There are no happy endings on Midnights. In “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” she laments how she used to think she’d “be saved by a perfect kiss.” Love might conquer, but it can’t save. Maybe nothing can. Taylor has relentlessly reinvented and achieved and yet finds no lasting salvation in romance, in thinness, in wealth or whiteness, in country acclaim, pop fame, or in being Taylor Swift. There is no salvation. There is just the self: “you’re on your own, kid / you always have been.”
No matter how shiny or famous or accomplished the conceputal self is, it remains a sinkhole. It is a place to get stuck. In “Dear Reader,” she searches for an escape from the self: “desert all your past lives / and if you don't recognize yourself / that means you did it right.” Ouch.
The self is a lonely, isolated place in which to hole up. The self depends on separation. It is maintained only by constructing borders between self and others, and between self and the world. There you are “all alone 'cause nobody's there / no one sees you lose when you're playing solitaire.”
Taylor explores the pain that stems the self. She even seems to reach for pain at times. She leans masochistic.
On “Midnight Rain” she quite clearly says “I wanted that pain.” In “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” she admits that “the God's honest truth is that the pain was heaven.” She basks in this pain, draws it out, as on “Labyrinth,” where she remarks "It only hurts this much right now / was what I was thinkin' the whole time.”
Why? Social psychologist Roy Baumeister proposes that pain and masochism serve as escapes from the conceptual self. “Pain supersedes the awareness of self as a symbolic being. Pain gradually obliterates psychological content, eventually leaving only the awareness of pain... attention is narrowed to the immediate present, both spatially and temporally.”
Pain offers freedom by offering the present. It’s almost as if Taylor’s solution to her troubles on Midnights is a kind of masochistic mindfulness practice. In “Labyrinth,” while being in pain “the whole time”, she notes to “breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out.” At the end of “You’re on Your Own, Kid” she similarly exhorts the listener to “take the moment and taste it.”
The present, whether or not you arrive there through physical pain, can offer relief from the burdens of the self. What happens when we set the self down? Taylor takes these rare and sweet unselfed moments and tastes them. In a mostly dark album, three upbeat, happy songs stand out: “Bejeweled,” “Karma,” and “Sweet Nothing.” Each of these tracks find Taylor stepping away from the self. There she finds moments of relief. In these uptempo tracks, the burdens of self, time, and memory momentarily lift.
In “Bejeweled,” Taylor finds lightness in rejecting memory. Perhaps ruminating on the past (which, as we’ve discussed, is a tomb and a crypt) is actually... bad? “They ask, ‘Do you have a man?’ / I could still say, ‘I don't remember’” she delights. Remembering is a lot of work. It reconstructs a contemptible, familiar self that appears stable through time: “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Taylor finds lightness, finds that she can still make “the whole room shimmer” when she stops ruminating on the past. Since the conceptual self depends on conceptualizing memory and time, these moments of outside of time offer relief from the conceptual self.
The second emotional high point of the album is “Karma,” where Taylor finds levity when she steps beyond the self. She finds this lightness in karma, which she defines as “a God / karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend / karma’s a relaxing thought / .... karma is a cat, purring in my lap.” Taylor delights in all of these small things. Notably, these small things all lie outside the typical bounds of the conceptual self. Taylor is obviously not a God, or a breeze, a thought, or a cat, and it is precisely there that she finds rare solace. For a moment she sets the weight of her own self down. She is able to hold instead a breeze, a cat, a relaxing thought. The self is a burden, and releasing it allows one to welcome the small offerings from the outside world.
The final emotional high point of the album comes in “Sweet Nothing,” an untroubled ballad with the sweet candence of a nursery rhyme. The troubles that darken the rest of Midnights clear as Taylor revels in a love where “all that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing.” Finally, the self does not have to provide anything. For a moment, Taylor can stop serving Taylor. Her partner asks for nothing from her self. She can take a break. The self can relax, can dissolve back into the sweet nothing from which it emerged. And what a lightness we find there as listeners! It is a profoundly soothing, gorgeous track.
On Midnights, we watch a person grapple with the pain of being a self. It is a stunning album. We watch time cycle and snare as midnights come and go, constructing with them certain selves and certain pain. I mean, even Taylor Swift needs a break from her self. It’s understandable that you might need a break too, kid. So “take the moment and taste it,” I guess. But I don’t know. As on “Dear Reader”: “never take advice from someone who’s falling apart.” The self is a painful gorgeous mess, but it sounds like there is freedom to be found when the self finally falls apart.
Taylor Swift (2022). Midnights, Republic Records
Roy F. Baumeister Ph.D. (1988) Masochism as escape from self, The Journal of Sex Research, 25:1, 28-59, DOI: 10.1080/00224498809551444
Grant, Jan; Crawley, Jim (2002). Transference and Projection: Mirrors to the Self
thank you for this analysis. i have been listening to midnights nonstop and am grappling with my own realization that i'm somewhat emotionally masochistic as well.
This was a great read! This album needs more literary and narrative analysis so thank you for writing this.
I also wanted to share an article about Taylor’s debut album which shares some similarities with the topics you talked about.
https://www.taylorswiftscholar.com/post/i-knew-everything-when-i-was-young-ts01-full-analysis