We need to calm down – but we just can’t! Just under an hour after winning video of the year at the 2022 MTV VMAs, Taylor Swift made fans’ dreams come true and confirmed further details of her upcoming new album. She’d already teased the album’s existence during her second VMAs acceptance speech (Swift also won best long-form video earlier in the evening on Sunday) and told the crowd in Newark, NJ, that it would be released on Oct. 21.
In an Instagram post at midnight on Aug. 29, Swift unveiled the album’s title “Midnights,” alongside the cover artwork: a photo of the singer with heavy blue eye makeup and holding a lighter. “‘Midnights,’ the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life, will be out October 21. Meet me at midnight,” she wrote in the caption.
A second slide features an image of Swift with her head in her hand and includes the text: “We lie awake in love and in fear, in turmoil and in tears. We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren’t – right this minute – about to make some fateful life-altering mistake. This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face. For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching – hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve . . . we’ll meet ourselves.”
On Sept. 16, Swift confirmed that she’s once again teamed up with producer Jack Antonoff for the album. “The making of Midnights ?,” she captioned a behind-the-scenes video on Instagram.
The album being new and not one of her long-awaited rerecordings, like “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” was another big surprise from the singer. The album will be Swift’s first completely new album since she released “Evermore” in December 2020. Her other latest offerings were rerecordings: in 2021, she released “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version),” the first two of six expected rerecorded albums. Swift also dropped new single “Carolina” from the movie “Where the Crawdads Sing” in 2022.
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