Taylor Swift rewarded fans who eagerly awaited the arrival of her new album Midnights with an extra 25 minutes of music.
"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,” the singer wrote in an Instagram post. “However! There were other songs we wrote on our journey to find that magic 13. I’m calling them 3am tracks.
“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.”
The seven additional tracks, available on streaming services, brings Midnights to nearly 70 minutes.
Last month, Swift said the Lavender edition of the album, available only at U.S. retailer Target, has three bonus tracks. Counting the “Mahogany,” “Blood Moon,” “Moonstone Blue” and “Jade Green” editions of Midnights, there are more than 20 versions of the album available on CD, LP and cassette.
As Midnights dropped, Swift took to social media to describe it as “a wild ride of an album” and “a collage of intensity, highs and lows and ebbs and flows.”
She added: “Life can be dark, starry, cloudy, terrifying, electrifying, hot, cold, romantic or lonely. Just like Midnights.”
Swift recognized the artists and songwriters who contributed to the collection – including her beau Joe Alwyn, who co-wrote “Sweet Nothing” under his pseudonym William Bowery – and thanked her creative partner Jack Antonoff.
“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,” she wrote. “HOWEVER… this is our first album we’ve done with just the two of us as main collaborators.”
Swift announced the title of her 10th studio album while accepting the MTV VMA for Video of the Year on Aug. 28. Hours later, she described the collection as 13 songs about “13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.”
“This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams,” she explained on social media. “The floors we pace and the demons we face. For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching – hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve… we’ll meet ourselves."
Midnights follows 2020’s evermore and last year’s re-recorded versions of 2008’s Fearless and 2012’s Red.
The seven 3am Ediiton tracks are:
14. “The Great War"
15. “Bigger Than The Whole Sky”
16. “Paris”
17. “High Fidelity”
18. “Glitch”
19. “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve”
20. “Dear Reader”