Taylor Swift likes the number 13, which may be one of the reasons why her “Midnights” album only has 13 tracks, making it one of the shortest releases in a long time. She doesn’t love it so much, though, that she wasn’t willing to release a surprise 20-track “3 am” deluxe version of the album, which was unveiled to fans on Friday at 3 a.m. ET.
With the National’s Aaron Dessner, who worked with her on almost all of her previous all-new studio album, 2020’s “Evermore,” but who appeared to be skipping the “Midnights” sessions in favour of Jack Antonoff, who produced all of the core 13 tracks, three of the seven bonus tracks on this extra edition were co-written and co-produced.
She posted on social media, “Surprise!” “I think of ‘Midnights’ as a complete concept album, with those 13 songs forming a full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour. However! There were other songs we wrote on our journey to find that magic 13.
“I’m calling them 3am tracks,” Swift continued. Lately I’ve been loving the feeling of sharing more of our creative process with you, like we do with From The Vault tracks. So it’s 3am and I’m giving them to you now.”
For $14.99, “Midnights (3 am Edition)” may be purchased digitally through her website and other platforms. All DSPs also offer access to the bonus tracks for streaming.
“The Great War,” “High Infidelity,” “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” “Bigger Than the Whole Sky,” “Paris,” “Glitch,” and “Dear Reader” are the seven additional songs on the deluxe edition. All of those, including the first three, were co-produced with Antonoff, just like everything else on the standard version.
There are currently 21 original songs available as part of the project. Along with remixes of “You’re on Your Own, Kid” and “Sweet Nothing” that are exclusively accessible via the chain’s variant, the Target-exclusive CD also features the bonus track “Hits Different,” which is absent even from the album’s extended “3 am” version.
Swift published a post stating that “Midnights” did mark the first time she’d made a full album with Antonoff not long before disclosing that she had indeed collaborated with Dessner on tracks for the album, simply ones that didn’t make the core version of the finished product.
On social media, she said, “Midnights is a wild ride of an album and I couldn’t be happier that my co pilot on this adventure was Jack Antonoff,” she wrote on social media. “He’s my friend for life (presumptuous I know but I stand by it) and we’ve been making music together for nearly a decade. HOWEVER… this is our first album we’ve done with just the two of us as main collaborators. We’d been toying with ideas and had written a few things we loved, but ‘Midnights’ actually really coalesced and flowed out of us when our partners (both actors) did a film together in Panama,” she noted, referring to her significant other, Joe Alwyn, and his, Margaret Qualley. The film Alwyn and Qualley were making, “Stars at Noon,” hit theaters Oct. 14.