People may occasionally call her pop confessionals “cringe,” or wonder if she’s oversharing—but in the tradition of many great poets before her, Swift’s bread and butter is in the gratuitous myth-making of her personal life. Penned with her trusted associates, Jack Antonoff (of the band Bleachers) and Aaron Dessner (of the band The National), Swift makes her most sensational revelations while sticking to the sound she cultivated on Midnights, pairing her distinct, galloping prosody with bespoke synth-pop and guitar fusions. Post Malone also lends hushed vocals in the opening track, “Fortnight,” while Florence Welch dials up the theatrics in the epic swamp noir of “Florida.”
Yet where curious listeners go looking for juice, they will find equal amounts of vinegar. Swift taps her country roots in the scathing “But Daddy I Love Him,” likening those critical of her romantic choices to the patronizing, small-town fundamentalists she eviscerated in classic songs like “Mean” and “You Need to Calm Down.” Well aware of how readily her songs become tabloid fodder, she toys with the gawking hordes like a cat does its prey: “I’m having his baby… No, I’m not,” she quips. “But you should see your faces!”
In contrast, glimmers of Lana Del Rey’s summertime sadness flicker in the twangy lament of “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”—a humble admission for Swift, whose admiration for Healy was eclipsed by the more objectionable parts of his persona. (“Whoa, maybe I can’t,” Swift concedes in the song’s final moments.) Swift also articulates the big chill of her previous relationship, presumably with Alwyn, with a shivering delivery in “So Long, London.”
Ironically, Swift shows the most guts in her arpeggiated dance-pop number “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” Framed by staged countdowns and the demanding cries of her audience, the song is a sobering treatise on managing mental health under the spotlight—which is to say, only barely holding it together. “Lights, camera, bitch, smile! Even if you wanna die,” she sings almost breathlessly, as if racing to whatever the industry decides is the (next) Top. “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday everyday,” she adds in the chorus.
Swift has more to say about the psychic damage of her chronic, if self-inflicted, overexposure in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” Reprising her role in 2020’s “Mad Woman,” from Folklore, she uses the song to play out a one-woman American horror story, describing her presence lording over pop culture like a vengeful phantom. If she can’t kill them with kindness, Swift decides she’ll haunt them instead: “I was tame, I was gentle ’til the circus life made me mean,” she states acerbically. It’s this song that arguably best sets the scene for Swift’s upcoming re-recording of Reputation, her 2017 screed from a pop star scorned.
