by Jill Warnke
Taylor Swift, American singer-songwriter, has all her fans waiting in anticipation for the night she releases her newest project: her 10th album, Midnights.
From the young age of 16, Taylor Swift has long since been rising in popularity with early hits such as “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me” (2008). Throughout the 2010s, Swift’s music and image has stayed in the public eye, becoming an iconic pop figure of the past decade. Since her debut, Swift has released 9 original albums.
It wasn’t until the VMAs (Video Music Awards) on August 28, that Taylor Swift officially announced her latest work in progress. After winning the VMA for video of the year, Swift announced live on television that her next original album, Midnights, would be released October 21, 2022. Later that night in an Instagram post, Swift described the album as “The stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.”
Fans are already buzzing about the new release of the album. In preparation for promotion, Swift changed her website’s theme to have a new background of dark purples and blues, a palette known to be associated with night.
While we don’t have much information about the new album, Swift’s fans, dubbed the ‘Swifties’, beg to differ.
Throughout her career, Taylor Swift has been dropping ‘easter eggs’ and hints towards upcoming songs and lyrics through different parts of her career profile such as her Instagram posts and CD booklets. Her newest upcoming album is no different.
An example of this would be in one of Taylor Swift’s posts where she captioned that one of her songs was to be posted at midnight, but it was spaced out as “M i d n i g h t”, referencing the title.
‘Swifties’ who have been speculating online also point out how there are sometimes random words capitalized in her CD booklets, which hint to lyrics in unreleased projects. For Midnights, she has been dropping clues, especially on her Instagram posts, and it is rumored that she has been hinting towards it since all the way back in August, 2019, when her album Lover was released. What’s also interesting to know, is that the Lover album was originally meant to be titled “Daylight”, being a direct complement to Midnights, so perhaps these two albums were supposed to release consecutively before the pandemic.
This information has been curated by the ‘Swifties’, who aim to decipher all of Swift’s secrets hidden in her social media appearances. To the Swifties, every letter and infliction is a clue, but it is unknown just how much of it is true up until the release date.
What we do know is that this pop star certainly knows how to advertise. The amount of buzz around Swift’s every Instagram post is tremendous, and this conspiracy rabbit hole goes deeper than a few tweets, with super fans dedicating hours to ‘decoding’ her messages. Credit is undeniably owed to Swift for knowing exactly how to keep people talking for almost 15 years.
Midnights by Taylor Swift is set to come out on October 21, 2022, and it will create an even bigger stir when it does. Swift’s masterful marketing brings together a community on the internet and beyond, that will only make more noise the sooner October approaches.
