Taylor Swift Shares Something Sweet That ‘Kept Me Up at Night’ While Writing ‘Midnights’

When Taylor Swift first announced her fast-approaching 10th studio album Midnights, she shared that its songs were based on “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.” But what exactly kept the pop star tossing and turning?

In an exclusive series filmed in partnership with Spotify, she’s been revealing exactly that. Two short videos filmed by Swift appeared earlier this week on the streaming service’s Midnights pre-save page, and as of Wednesday (Oct. 19), the “All Too Well” singer has added two more. In each of the four videos, she shares one concept that she fixated on during her middle-of-the-night songwriting sessions that resulted in her Oct. 21-slated new album.

“The third thing that kept me up at night …,” she says in one of the two new Spotify videos. “Wondering what might have been.”

In the second new video, Swift — wearing a colorful striped shirt and pale red lipstick — can’t help but smile a little when she reveals “the fourth thing that kept me up at night.” “Falling in love,” she simply says.

At the beginning of the intimate Spotify series, the 11-time Grammy winner promised that there would be five total videos — meaning Swifties have one more to look forward to. The first two found Swift slyly confessing that “self-loathing” and “fantasizing about revenge” inspired certain tracks on Midnights.

Also, as part of her Spotify partnership, Swift has spent the week staging light-up billboards in different cities all over the world — New York City, London, São Paulo and Nashville so far — that are each programmed to display one unreleased lyric from her new album at the stroke of midnight local time. The billboards don’t say which songs the lyrics are taken from, however, leaving it up to the imagination of the singer’s fans for now.

“Just like clockwork, the dominoes cascaded in a line,” read the one located in Brazil. And in Times Square, another read revealed “I should not be left to my own devices.”

Watch Taylor Swift open up about the inspirations behind Midnights on Spotify mobile here.