Unlocking The Midnights Prologue: What It Reveals & Why It’s Crucial (Full Text)
Taylor Swift’s album prologues are invaluable for our understanding.
What began in her self-titled debut album as a simple list of thank-yous has evolved into an album thesis: a literary summary, explaining her inspirations, themes, and providing context for the songs that follow.
The Midnights Prologue presents the central concept of the album: things that keep Taylor up at night. But what else does the prologue tell us about her songwriting process, her biggest fears, and her life’s regrets?
Here’s my complete English teacher analysis of Taylor’s Midnights Prologue, line by line.
Read the full text of the prologue below, then I’ll pick it apart and explain the deeper meanings.
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Context: The Midnights Era
The Midnights Era truly kicked off the age of Taylor Swift: the years we will talk about in the decades to come. But it’s important to understand where Taylor was coming from as she walked into 2022, and into a new era.
In 2020, when the world shut down with the pandemic, Taylor never shut down: she grew and blossomed. She released not one, but two pandemic albums: folklore, then evermore, just six months apart.
These two albums changed the trajectory of her creative life forever. As she told us in the folklore prologue:
“In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory.”
She embraced a new sound, wrote an intricate and vivid new style of lyrics, and began writing narrative stories that toe the line between fantasy and reality. It seems she opened Pandora’s Box of creativity, and she would retain this new level of creativity in her future albums and endeavors.
But, all the while, she was also in the middle of an important goal: reclaiming her name and life’s work. Years after the masters heist, Taylor began re-recording her first six studio albums. In 2022, she released her first “Taylor’s Version” album: Fearless (Taylor’s Version).
Red (Taylor’s Version) then followed, with each re-recording featuring tracks “from the vault” that didn’t make the original albums.
Then in 2022 – as if her songbook wasn’t prolific enough – she dropped a brand new studio album: Midnights.
She began her epic Eras Tour the following year. She broke every tour record ever set, and then – to add more fuel to the fire – she dropped Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) in the midst of the tour.
But it seems that in all of this calculated chaos, there are many things that kept Taylor up at night. Midnights is her collection of these ruminations, narrating the sleepless nights of her life in this complex album.
Here’s how she introduced it.
Midnights Prologue: Full Text, 2022
“What keeps you up at night?
It’s a momentary glimmer of distraction. The tiniest notion of reminiscent thought that wanders off into wondering, the spark that lights a tinderbox of fixation. And now it’s irreversible. The flame has caught. You’re wide awake.
Maybe it’s that one urgent question you meant to ask someone years ago but didn’t. Someone that slipped through the cracks in your history, and they’re too far gone now anyway. All the ghost ships that have sailed and sailed away, but at this hour, they’re anchored in your harbor. They sit with flags waving, bright and beautiful. And it’s almost like it’s real.
Sometimes sleep is as evasive as happiness. Isn’t it mystifying how quickly we vascillate between self love and loathing at this hour? One moment, your life looks like a night sky of gleaming stars. The next, the fog has descended. Suddenly you’re in the town you left behind all those years ago. The trees of your youth with the phantom memory echoes of your belly laughter, and the rope indentations of your old tire swing still on the branch. All the phone numbers you still know by heart but never call anymore. The boy’s devastated face as he peeled out of your driveway. The family man he is now.
What must they all think of you.
Why can’t you sleep? Maybe you lie awake in the aftershock of falling headlong into a connection that feels like some surreal cataclysmic event. Like spontaneous combustion, or seeing snow falling on a tropical beach. A lavender haze crush that feels like the crash of a wave.
Or was tonight the night you realized how solitary, how alone you really are, no matter how high you climb. The elevation just makes it colder.
Some midnights, you’re out and you’re buzzing with electric current – an adventurer in pursuit of a rapturous thrill. Music blaring from speakers and the reckless intimacy of dancing with strangers. Something in this shadowy room to make you feel shiny again. On these nights, you know that there are facets of you that only glow in the dark.
Why are you still up at this hour? Because you’re cosplaying vengeance fantasies, where the bad bad man is hauled away in handcuffs and you get to watch it happen. You laugh into the mirror with a red wine snarl. You look positively deranged.
Maybe you were trying to mastermind matters of the heart again. You’ve gotten lost in the labyrinth of your head, where the fear wraps its claws around the fragile throat of true love. Will you be able to save it in time? Save it from who? Well, it’s obvious. From you.
We lie awake in love and in fear and in turmoil and in tears. We stare at the 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.
See you there. Midnight sharp.
Taylor”
-Taylor Swift, Midnights Prologue (2022)
Midnights Prologue Analysis: Line by Line
Here are the central themes and ideas that Taylor explores in the prologue, and what they mean in the larger context of her career and her songwriting.
On the Album’s Themes
“What keeps you up at night?
This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.”
Translation: ‘This is a concept album.‘
Taylor introduces her new album with the simple question: “what keeps you up at night?” This is the central theme of the album: sleepless nights, and the spinning thoughts that keep you awake.
What does this mean? It means that Midnights is a concept album: every song is not only “written in the middle of the night,” but it’s also a non-chronological account of her worries.
The unifying theme of every song is rumination, whether worrying about losing love or losing her mind. But, as we’ll learn in the rest of the prologue, worries manifest change.
It’s change that she’s really after in this album: solutions to her problems, a new path to walk, and deciding what to leave behind.
On Her Central Metaphors
“It’s a momentary glimmer of distraction. The tiniest notion of reminiscent thought that wanders off into wondering, the spark that lights a tinderbox of fixation. And now it’s irreversible. The flame has caught. You’re wide awake.”
Translation: ‘What starts as a passing thought can turn into a life-altering idea.’
Taylor was, of course, inspired by sleepless nights, “midnights” being the central metaphor that ties the album together. But it’s how she describes these moments in the prologue that clues us in to what’s really going on in this album.
These songs all began as “the tiniest notion of a reminiscent thought”, and then ignited into “a tinderbox of fixation.” The tracks of Midnights aren’t passing worries; they’re the worries that keep you “wide awake.” They’re the big worries. Existential worries. Burning questions.
Her second central metaphor (and motif, in her lyrics) is fire: the flame of ideas, that slowly lights her surrounding thoughts ablaze.
What’s really going on in your mind when it gets to ruminating? It’s searching, trying to find a solution, and trying to find an action to take to fix the situation.
In Taylor’s case, if the ideas are flames, she has a decision to make: put out the fire and go back to sleep, or add fuel to the fire, and burn everything to the ground.
On the album cover, we can see her doing exactly this: playing with fire. Taylor is holding the lighter, and she’s responsible for whether these thoughts – these fires – will smolder, or burn her house to the ground.
The larger implication is that the tracks of Midnights – all the sleepless ruminations – are searching. She’s searching for hope, for solutions, for love, for revenge. Really, she’s searching for herself.
Is she the fire, is she the fuel, or is she the ashes?
On The Meaning of “Midnights”
“We lie awake in love and in fear and in turmoil and in tears. We stare at the 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.”
Translation: ‘I’m caught in an existential crisis, and I feel like I’m in a cage of my own making. Have I made a huge mistake?’
“Midnights” is a poetic way of describing these hours of anxiety. Taylor often uses this setting as a metaphor for a time of existential worry, as in the 2am of Breathe, 3am of I Bet You Think About Me, and 4 am of Come Back…Be Here, and many more.
But what about “midnight” specifically? We all know the fairytale where something significant happens at midnight: Cinderella (also an inspiration for the Bejeweled music video). At midnight, Cinderella will lose her gown, her carriage, and her glass slippers, and turn into an ordinary girl again.
Midnight, for Taylor, is when the calendar – the trajectory of her life – flips, moving from one time period to another. In these “midnights”, she can start fresh. Start over. Maybe she’ll metaphorically lose her princess costume, ditch the prince, run away from the kingdom, and go back to metaphorically scrubbing floors.
She’ll “lie awake in love and in fear and in turmoil and in tears” in her “self-made cages”. But then, after midnight, she’ll have to decide whether she’s made “some fateful, life-altering mistake.”
Therefore, it’s really what happens after midnight that’s most significant. The entire album, she’s on the precipice, trying to decide what to do.
“Midnights” is an hour where everything will change, for better or for worse. Will the “tinderbox” burn everything to the ground, or will she stay in her “self-made cage,” and “stare at the walls and drink until they speak back”?
The clock is ticking, and time is running out. She has a decision to make.
On the Imagery of the Album
“The trees of your youth with the phantom memory echoes of your belly laughter, and the rope indentations of your old tire swing still on the branch. All the phone numbers you still know by heart but never call anymore. The boy’s devastated face as he peeled out of your driveway. The family man he is now.
What must they all think of you.”
Translation: ‘On my darkest nights, I journey into dreamscapes of my past, and wonder how it all got me here. Why couldn’t I have stayed in the simplicity of youth? What do people think about me now, that I’m no longer an innocent little girl?’
The imagery that was so potent and vivid in folklore and evermore followed Taylor into Midnights, and she hints at this in the prologue.
She gives us a taste, with “the phantom memory echoes of your belly laughter,” and “the rope indentations of your old tire swing still on the branch.” She’s journeying into her childhood, in vivid mental images of simpler times, when life was clear and everything was nostalgic.
“All the phone numbers you still know by heart” conjures this nostalgia, too. When she’s in her darkest hours, she mentally checks out, and goes back to a time where she felt safe and confident, with landline phones and laughing ‘til it hurts.
But then she jumps from simple memories into complicated ones: “The boy’s devastated face as he peeled out of your driveway. The family man he is now.” She’s illustrating how a passing thought – a tire swing, in her childhood home – quickly jumps into self-doubt and regret.
We can see how she makes the mental leap: the tire swing is in the yard. The yard is near the driveway, and in that driveway, she broke someone’s heart. This is how memory works: positive associations also have negative ones, and the negative ones lead you straight into spiraling rumination.
She’s using her imagery here, like in the rest of the album, to describe her brooding over her regrets. “What must they all think of you” is the culmination of this train of thought: what do all the people who populated past Taylor’s world think of her superstardom?
The imagery of the album are her mental paintings that appear when she’s in this dark night of the soul. She’ll vacillate between the beautiful “sprinkler splashes” of youth, to “fireplace ashes” of adulthood.
On What Haunts Us
“Maybe it’s that one urgent question you meant to ask someone years ago but didn’t. Someone that slipped through the cracks in your history, and they’re too far gone now anyway. All the ghost ships that have sailed and sailed away, but at this hour, they’re anchored in your harbor. They sit with flags waving, bright and beautiful. And it’s almost like it’s real.”
Translation: ‘Sometimes I’m haunted by the ones that got away.’
Out of all the things that keep Taylor up at night, she describes the ones that got away with the most haunting imagery. These lost lovers are “ghost ships” who have repeatedly “sailed away,” but now “sit with flags waving” in her harbor.
Her “harbor” is the front of her mind: the spinning thoughts that won’t abate. The ghosts of lost love sit there, bobbing in the dark sea, tempting her with their flags flying high. It’s almost as if she can leap back in time to where they sailed the same sea. But it’s not real.
“That one urgent question,” of course alludes to the song Question. But what are the “ghost ships,” since this imagery doesn’t refer to any particular songs on Midnights?
The clues lie in her previous album: she used this imagery several times in evermore:
- “I’m like the water when your ship rolled in that night” –willow
- “Eyes like sinking ships on waters so inviting, I almost jump in” –gold rush
- “And my waves meet your shore” –long story short
- “I’m on waves, out being tossed” –evermore
I surmise that whatever “ghost ships” were haunting her on evermore are the same ones that appear in the Midnights prologue. I think it’s safe to say that some of these sleepless nights are from her more recent past, and even her present.
She was haunted in evermore, trying to find closure and move on. But she’s still haunted in Midnights, likely by the same people, the same questions, and the same need to find a solution.
On Loneliness
“Or was tonight the night you realized how solitary, how alone you really are, no matter how high you climb. The elevation just makes it colder.”
Translation: ‘I’m totally alone in this life.’
Taylor has alluded to the loneliness of fame several times before Midnights, most notably in The Lucky One, Nothing New, and mirrorball.
Here, she describes her pedestal of celebrity as a frigid, solitary place, up on the highest peak with no one nearby.
This portion of the prologue likely alludes to right where you left me, in which she says: “Did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen? Time went on for everybody else, she won’t know it”
She’s “frozen” not only in time, but in place. No matter how far she gets in her career, and no matter how many records she breaks, it still means she’s alone: she’s the only one to have ever accomplished such things, and there’s no one beside her.
“The elevation just makes it colder” means that the more famous and successful she gets, the farther away from humanity she is. She’s alone not only in her success, but in her personal life: she can never have a normal life ever again, and it’s a chilly place to be stuck.
The alternative is to be “pushed from the precipice,” and fall off her pedestal back to the ground. She doesn’t want that, either. So what’s a girl to do?
Previously, “he built a fire just to keep me warm.” But now, in Midnights, she’s very much alone, and getting “colder and colder”.
On Self-Doubt
“Sometimes sleep is as evasive as happiness. Isn’t it mystifying how quickly we vacillate between self love and loathing at this hour? One moment, your life looks like a night sky of gleaming stars. The next, the fog has descended.”
Translation: ‘Sometimes, I think I’m the greatest. Then seconds later, I think I’m causing my own problems and I hate myself for it.’
A major theme of this album is dreams vs. nightmares, and what it means to have both simultaneously.
Throughout the tracks, she wavers between optimism and sarcastic loathing, trying to find confidence. Sometimes she’s on top of the world, and sometimes she falls down rabbit holes of self-hatred.
In Anti-Hero, Taylor is (satirically) “the problem,” who will “stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror.”
In Bejeweled, she knows her self-worth, and won’t tolerate being tread upon: “a diamond’s gotta shine.”
In Dear Reader, she gives advice, then quickly retracts: “you should find another guiding light, but I shine so bright.”
In Lavender Haze, she wants to hold onto this dreamy heartbeat of love, but in You’re Losing Me, she can’t find a pulse.
This entire album flows between optimism and pessimism, forgiveness and revenge, and self-love and self-hatred. And isn’t that exactly what a midnight stream of consciousness feels like?
On Crushes & New Love
“Why can’t you sleep? Maybe you lie awake in the aftershock of falling headlong into a connection that feels like some surreal cataclysmic event. Like spontaneous combustion, or seeing snow falling on a tropical beach. A lavender haze crush that feels like the crash of a wave.”
Translation: ‘Sometimes it’s not trauma and terror that keeps me awake. Sometimes I’m falling in love, and it’s wonderful, but also scary.’
Taylor admits that it’s not always turmoil keeping her awake: sometimes, it’s a crush. But crushes, too, have their own worries.
This portion of the prologue likely refers to several different songs.
She calls out Question with “some surreal cataclysmic event”: “that meteor strike.”
“Spontaneous combustion” likely refers to the sparks of Mastermind: “the touch of a hand lit the fuse.”
“Snow falling on a tropical beach” refers to, of course, Snow on the Beach.
“A lavender haze crush that feels like the crash of a wave” refers to Lavender Haze.
But overall, her message in this paragraph is: sometimes falling in love keeps us awake. And although it feels like a once-in-a-lifetime event to witness, sometimes it’s also terrifying, just like a natural disaster.
On Facets of Ourselves
“Some midnights, you’re out and you’re buzzing with electric current – an adventurer in pursuit of a rapturous thrill. Music blaring from speakers and the reckless intimacy of dancing with strangers. Something in this shadowy room to make you feel shiny again. On these nights, you know that there are facets of you that only glow in the dark.”
Translation: ‘I don’t spend all my nights ruminating alone. Sometimes, I go out and I rediscover parts of myself I thought I’d lost.’
This paragraph likely refers to Bejeweled, where she says, “and by the way, I’m going out tonight,” and “I can still make the whole place shimmer.”
These parts of herself – the shiny, reflective mirrorball pieces – are the facets of herself “that only glow in the dark.” But what does it mean to glow in the dark?
It means that when the spotlight is turned on, you don’t get to see all the pieces of her. Only “in the dark” – in private, carefree moments – do pieces of the real Taylor Swift emerge from behind the corporate machine.
It’s about letting loose; something Taylor likely doesn’t get to do often. But when she does, it’s refreshing and renewing. She remembers pieces of herself that were lost to fame.
She doesn’t only exist to entertain us. She glows all on her own, and when she re-discovers pieces of herself lost to the public, she can re-center herself. This is her central quest: find herself, and find out why she keeps losing fragments of her identity.
On Revenge Fantasies
“Why are you still up at this hour? Because you’re cosplaying vengeance fantasies, where the bad bad man is hauled away in handcuffs and you get to watch it happen. You laugh into the mirror with a red wine snarl. You look positively deranged.”
Translation: ‘Sometimes I fantasize about taking down the people who have wronged me. It’s not something I like about myself, but I’m only human.’
This portion of the prologue likely refers to Vigilante Shit, where she’ll be “dressin’ for revenge,” and reveal damning evidence against her enemies. The “bad bad man” will be taken down, and she’ll “get to watch it happen.”
In Karma, she also dreams of revenge, though this time, the universe will bring down the hammer on her behalf:
“Trick me once, trick me twice
Don’t you know that cash ain’t the only price?
It’s coming back around”
But she doesn’t exactly love this vengeful quality that keeps her up at night, pulsing with anger and plotting out vengeance. “You look positively deranged” means she knows how crazy this makes her look.
Like in Anti-Hero, she slyly admits she knows this is not the most attractive quality. We all do it, but what does it mean when parts of us are dedicated to the destruction of others?
On Losing Control
“Maybe you were trying to mastermind matters of the heart again. You’ve gotten lost in the labyrinth of your head, where the fear wraps its claws around the fragile throat of true love. Will you be able to save it in time? Save it from who? Well, it’s obvious. From you.”
Translation: ‘I plan and plot everything, because I’m always afraid of losing love. Is my life too big and chaotic for anyone to withstand?’
Taylor’s central worry in the arena of love has been – for a while now – “who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?”
Here, she details just how hard she works to prevent her public life from destroying her private life.
To “mastermind matters of the heart”, of course, refers to Mastermind’s: “what if I told you none of it was accidental?” Her love life, she reveals in that track, is a series of “dominoes cascaded in a line,” all causing a chain reaction to create her perfect plan.
But this “labyrinth” of her mind, where she lines up dominos to watch them fall, isn’t only to get what she wants. It’s because of fear, and fueled by fear.
In Labyrinth, a song about love rebounding just when it seemed destined to fail, she reveals this deep fear. “I thought the plane was going down,” she says, “How’d you turn it right around”?
The airplane of their relationship is bound to crash, but then it miraculously levels out, and not because of her mastermind plots: the other person saves it. It was out of her control the entire time, but it was also caused by her.
“Fear wraps its claws around the fragile throat of true love” in Taylor’s world. But what is she afraid of?
Herself. Her life. Her massive fame. Is it too much for anyone to withstand?
She’s exploring the idea that, although many things are entirely in her control, she’s also created a kind of Frankenstein’s monster with her massive career. She is “the monster on the hill,” and can anyone prevent disaster once the monster is loose?
To Her Reader
“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.
See you there. Midnight sharp.”
Translation: ‘This album is for all the curious searchers like me. Don’t give up. If you keep going, you’ll find out what it was all for.’
She dedicates the album to all of her “readers” who have had similar worries. To “all of us who have tossed and turned” the night away, wondering what will happen, praying the worst isn’t yet to come.
There is optimism to be found, she insists, if we “keep the lanterns lit and go searching.” Don’t let your fire die out, she urges her reader: keep going.
Hopefully, if we keep persisting, “when the clock strikes twelve…we’ll meet ourselves.” Once our Cinderella stories come to an end, and we’ve been through all the trials and tribulations of our own plotlines, we’ll find out what it was all for.
The culmination of all the midnight ruminations is, really, a search to find ourselves: what we want, what we don’t want, how strong we are, how resilient we are.
This is the central query of the album: who am I, and who are you? She sums this up with the first line of the album from Lavender Haze: “meet me at midnight.”
This simple invitation has a double meaning: ‘meet me here at midnight, inside this album, and you’ll also meet yourself, ’ vs. ‘you’ll meet the real Taylor Swift at midnight.’
We’ll find pieces of ourselves inside the album, but we’ll also find pieces of the real Taylor: the one who can’t sleep, the one who thinks she’s the problem, and the one who’s caught on a precipice, about to make a life-altering decision.
Midnights Prologue Meaning: Final Thoughts
In her two previous album prologues, folklore and evermore, Taylor was lost in the woods: creating pseudo-fictional stories, narrating her life without really narrating her life.
Here, she steps out of the woods and back into reality. But in order to move forward, she has to look back. Will the ghosts of her past haunt her future? Will her past decisions haunt her present?
Throughout Midnights, she examines her darkest nights of the soul, and tries to figure out what they mean. She’s unsure, unsteady, thrilled, and devastated. But most importantly, she’s looking for pieces she lost along the way.
Taylor is “the problem,” but she’s also the solution. She just has to meet herself, accept herself, and put all the fractured pieces together to solve the existential puzzle.
Once she collects all the pieces of her past, leaving some behind, and carrying some with her, will she be able to move forward? Will her wildfire ruminations burn it all down, or can she tame the flames?
We don’t know, but one thing’s for sure: Taylor is holding the lighter, and it’s her decision to make.
Read More: Lyrical Analysis of Every Song on Midnights
- Lavender Haze
- Maroon
- Anti-Hero
- Snow on the Beach
- You’re On Your Own, Kid
- Midnight Rain
- Question…?
- Vigilante Shit
- Bejeweled
- Labyrinth
- Karma
- Sweet Nothing
- Mastermind
- The Great War
- Bigger Than The Whole Sky
- Paris
- High Infidelity
- Glitch
- Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve
- Dear Reader
- Hits Different
- You’re Losing Me
Read More Album Prologues
