by Karen Kohler
On Sunday August 28th, Taylor Swift made a highly anticipated appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards. Her outfit was a full silver-jeweled piece, a tribute to one she wore in the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video. This dress could also be compared to the one she wore at the 2009 VMAs when she was interrupted by Kanye West during her acceptance speech. Due to these similarities, there was much speculation among fans that she would be announcing the drop of her “Reputation” re-recording. This would’ve made sense because coming up in November is the five year anniversary of the original “Reputation” release, and that’s how long she has to wait to begin the re-recording process.
However, with that announcement we would’ve still had a while to wait for the album and turns out we won’t have to be waiting very long after all and we’re getting a whole new album! Taylor won three VMAs, one for video of the year, one for best long-form video and one for best direction. All of these were for her “All Too Well” short film released in November. After winning video of the year, she announced that she had a new album coming out on October 21st and she would tell us more at midnight.
This left fans anxiously waiting until midnight when she did indeed post that her new album was called “Midnights” and would include thirteen tracks, each documenting a sleepless night throughout her life. That’s all the information she’s given us directly, the rest is really speculation. For the VMAs after party, Swift wore a dark blue, it could also be referred to as a midnight blue, sleeveless dress with silver stars. Many Taylor fans would agree that each of her albums can quite easily be assigned a color based on the album cover and general aesthetics. With “Red” it’s particularly easy, but with this album it seems a dark blue would be appropriate based on the cover and Taylor’s promo so far. From the description it sounds like it will be more of a sad album but based on the title it sounds like it could be Pop. In addition to the original cover, she released four alternative ones. These seem to have some callback to 70s and 80s style and album covers, so perhaps this album will have callbacks to that as well. At this point Taylor has dabbled in many genres but she hasn’t done much Rock yet so there is some hope that this could be a Rock album. However she is always surprising us so we won’t really know anything until midnight October 21st!
