Taylor Swift Brings Some Sparkling Pop to Her Deepening Songcraft on Midnights

Taylor Swift’s tenth album Midnights, out last night, starts with a bit of a fakeout: a pretty straightforward hip-hop inflected song called “Lavender Haze,” where she describes feelings of depression and her frustration with being hounded about when she is going to get married. The song was co-written by Zoe Kravitz and her longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn (under the William Bowery pen name he debuted on 2020’s Folklore), who both know quite a bit about public relationship scrutiny. This mode of lyrical self-exegesis is sometimes Swift at her best. But it can fall flat when it feels like a straightforward… Read Full Article