Courtney Balcombe – Sports Editor

clb6264@psu.edu

On October 21, Taylor Swift released her newest album “Midnights,” which made her the first artist in the Billboard Hot 100’s 64-year history to occupy the entire top 10 in a single week. She also passed Madonna for the most top 10 hits among women. “Midnights” opens as Swift’s 11th No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.

According to Luminate Data, in its first week out, “Midnights” had the equivalent of 1,578,000 sales in the United States – the biggest weekly take for any album in seven years since Adele’s “25” arrived with a boom of nearly 3.5 million.

According to The New York Times, the standard CD and LP versions of “Midnights” came in four forms, with variant artwork, and Target sold additional variations, with lavender-colored vinyl or three extra tracks on its CD.

Swift also sold autographed versions through her website, and three hours after “Midnights” came out she released an expanded “3am Edition,” with seven additional tracks. In the most commented-upon gimmick, the back covers of the four vinyl versions, when arranged in a grid, form the numbers of a clock, and, for $49, Swift’s website even sold the parts of a wall clock to bring it all together. “Collect all 4 editions!” Swift’s website said when promoting the releases.

Now, “Midnights “is about reflection, not reinvention. Swift has explained at length, in her own flowery vernacular that these 13 songs are “a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.”

The songs are meant to represent the thoughts that keep Swift up late such as the unpredictable rise and devastating fall of romance; the binary of the “good girl” and the “bad girl,” the chafing of societal expectation, and the uncomfortable acceptance of her fallibility. Life, she declares, “is emotionally abusive.”

Personally, I am obsessed with “Anti-Hero” and “Karma.” However, that does not mean I do not like the rest of the album. The rest of the album is pretty upbeat and worth listening to, but I just did not relate to them in the same way I did with those two songs. Overall I’d give this album an 8/10.