Midnights is already a hit. Spotify has told us, charts compilers on both side of the Atlantic have confirmed it, Swifties spread it on social media.
Will Swift present the album to fans in venues around the globe? Don’t bet against it.
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Swift stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday night (Oct. 24) for a chat, and some hints at concerts to come.
When Fallon asked if a tour was on her mind, her first in four years, Swift responded. “I think I should do it.” With a little more prompting, “I should do it.” And a nudge on when it might happen, “When it’s time, we’ll do it.”
Though she gave the late-night host nothing definitive, Swift admits she has a hankering for the live experience. “I really miss it,” she enthuses. “I really miss that connection.”
Midnights, Swift’s tenth studio album, dropped last Friday (Oct. 21) and immediately reached its audience, everywhere. Spotify announced it had smashed the music platform’s 24-hour streaming record. In the U.S., it’s sprinting to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, with more than 1.2 million chart sales racked up in just three days. In the U.K., it’s on track for the chart crown with more than 140,000 units shifted in the same frame.
Those numbers are music to Swift’s ears.
“I’m beside myself,” she says of its early success. “I’m feeling very overwhelmed by the fans’ love of this record. I’m also feeling, like, very soft and fragile. The two can exist at once.”
For all the numbers and the adoration, she’s “just happy to be here,” she insists. “I’m 32. So we’re considered geriatric pop stars. They start trying to put us out to pasture at 25.”
During her time in the NBC studio, Swift discusses the mystery of writing (“the more I write, the more I keep writing”), her productive zone (“in the last six or seven years, I’ve been constantly making things… The more things I make, the happier I am”), she calls out her “genius” collaborator Lana Del Rey, and flexes her cat-lady talents for naming feline breeds.
Sometimes the words and music are an involuntary reflex. And when it happens, TayTay reaches for her phone and records it.
Midnights, she continues, is “a pretty dark album, but I’d say I had more fun making it than any album I’ve ever made.” You can pen songs “about pain or grief or suffering or loss or hard things that you go through in life. Shame – you know, love to write about that one. Self-loathing…,” but over time, she continues, making music is “like a way to suck the poison out of a snakebite.”
Later in the Q&A, Swift walks us through the new music videos for “Anti-Hero” and “Bejeweled,” which features cameos from Laura Dern, the Haim sisters and Dita Von Teese.
TayTay wrote and directed the clip, which arrived at midnight, of course, something she’s keen to do more often. “Writing them and then directing them, that’s kind of the way that it works in my head…they kind of go hand in hand.”
Watch below.
