Taylor Swift Is a Mastermind at Subtext

You can be, too

When Midnights first came out, I was honestly underwhelmed at the album as a whole, especially with “Mastermind” as a last track. Compared to some other last tracks — “Daylight” and “Clean” come to mind — I felt the album didn’t so much end as stop.

But if a commenter I saw on YouTube is right, and we should view Midnights as a breaking up album, “Mastermind” lives up to its name after all. I have no interest in getting into the real-life drama here, because it’s not relevant to learning how to write. Instead, I want to look at the thesis statement of Midnights as a breaking up album, “Mastermind” as a last track, and what we can learn about subtext from what happened.

The Breaking Up Evidence

“Bejeweled” is the most obvious of tracks that, it could be argued, take place in the middle of something ending. Most specifically, we get: “They ask, ‘Do you have a man?’ I can still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” The song is basically begging to not be taken for granted because the relationship isn’t a guarantee. This is re-iterated in the line “I made you my world. Have you heard, I can reclaim the land.”

Another thing I want to point out here has to do with the “Bejeweled” music video and the allusions in Midnights. There is an obvious Cinderella connection in the video, and in Cinderella, midnight is when the magic ends. The album doesn’t take place at the ball, then, or even after the ball when Cinderella is in rags (or, in the “Bejeweled” music video, in a castle all her own), but at that transitional moment — something is ending.

I won’t go into detail song by song here because I want to focus on “Mastermind,” but the hesitancy and even cynicism with which love gets described on the album became clear to me when I re-listened with this theme in mind. And even if this wasn’t Taylor’s intent, I fully stand by that if an interpretation works, we can learn from it.

Mastermind, Cliché, and Subtext

I was in Vietnam when Midnights released, so it was a comfortable 10am on a Friday for me when I first listened to it. And then the album… just kind of stopped. For me, the 3am edition I got that afternoon was much-needed, because while “Mastermind” felt… fine, I guess, it didn’t feel like the last song on a Taylor Swift album usually does. Here are the qualms I had with it:

• The chorus is just a cascading domino line of cliches. From someone who is a mastermind at lyricism, it felt lazy. The verses and pre-choruses aren’t much better in terms of originality.
• The song stops. I loved the bridge — I think it’s one of the strongest bridges on the album — but I expected a much bigger turn in the story, maybe that the “you” had also been scheming, or something. All we got was how she “saw a wide smirk on your face. You knew the entire time.”

Rethinking the Song

If, though, this isn’t a love song, but an ending, it hits different. After all, if we have this song about a grandiose plan for a beautiful love and it just kind of stops, and we’re left feeling empty and like something is missing, then Swift managed to make us feel the same way she was feeling without ever saying she felt that way.

By relying on cliches, it feels like this “Mastermind” path wasn’t really hers. You become a mastermind in chess by learning all the moves and taking the best ones at any given moment, not by thinking outside the box. She even says that “all the wisest women” do love this way.

Victory can feel hollow, too, when you live for the chase, and you constantly are searching for something more (like the narrator in “Midnight Rain”). The song saying, “I worked really hard to get you and now you’re mine” has the same anticlimactic feeling as it must feel to lose something slowly, without the huge, 2am screaming-in-the-rain breakup.

Show, Don’t Tell

I’ve been watching lots of videos explaining how music works (Howard Ho and Brett Boles, if you want to have your minds blown about music) in musical theater and even in the scores of movies. One thing Boles said that has stuck with me is that the lyrics can lie, but the music can’t. (We will get to the writing application momentarily; I promise it analogizes.)

The music in “Mastermind” is almost the same four chords that Taylor (and most artists) rely on, but she spends a lot of time on the major fourth and the minor sixth. These aren’t particularly stable chords. They long for resolution. Every time but the very last note of the song, the chorus ends not on the tonic, the resolving chord, but the major fourth, which “suggests a feeling of unfinished business or suspense.”

I looked up the chord progression just now to write this article, but now that I’ve seen it, I think the uneasiness I feel listening to the song was programmed into the music.

Lyrically, what we get on the surface is “I planned this all along and now it’s mine.” But between the unstable chord progression, the cliches that fill the lines, and the sudden ending, there is a subtext of “but it wasn’t enough; it didn’t satiate me.”

How to Create Effects in Prose

Now that you’ve hung in there with me through the lyric analysis, how do you use this in fiction? Well, you let your narrator be unreliable on the surface — lying to us — while providing subtextual clues as to what’s really happening. I want to go beyond clues like avoiding eye contact when lying to other characters and talk about how you write the story itself.

Remember what I said about how the lyrics can lie, but the music can’t? I think it works to say that the surface text can lie, but the subtext can’t.

Description

One of the things I think about when I’m writing is what the character would notice. This can be more surface-level, like how my musician characters will use music analogies, and pay more attention to sounds than visuals, but you can also use it to create juxtaposition.

In “Mastermind,” this is achieved with the juxtaposition of “Look how smart I am” with the cliches. It could also be achieved by a character who’s supposedly having a good day stopping to describe a rotting trunk, or a character who says they are not in love spending a paragraph on the two birds roosting in the same nest.

Adjectives and Analogies

Beyond what gets described is how it gets described. Like in “Labyrinth,” when Swift sings “oh no, I’m falling in love,” we get a different mood than we do from “jump then fall.” Sunshine can be described as welcome and fitting, or oppressive and demanding.

The key here, especially if you’re looking for subtle ways to create an effect, is to juxtapose these adjectives with how the character says they’re feeling. “Labyrinth” from Midnights describes love as a falling plane, an elevator she doesn’t trust, and a labyrinth. None of these are good things to be compared to, even as the song proclaims to be about love.

Pacing

Mood is affected significantly by the length of our sentences and paragraphs. Ones that meander through clauses and compound sentences in paragraphs that cross pages give a different feeling than the staccato of short sentences in single paragraphs. This is a fairly common technique when writing love stories or romantic subplots:

I’m not in love with him.

I’m not. I’m just looking out for my best interests, and I need him alive.

That’s all there is to this.

The certainty with with those words are spoken is underlaid with this feeling that the person she’s trying to convince is herself. The short, declarative sentences don’t leave room for negotiation, and the only long sentence is her meandering toward a justification of why she’s not killing him.

Conclusion

In writing, it can be tempting to tell a story on the surface level. But the best of stories — in music and in narrative — come together when there is a contrast between what is said and what is implied, or between what is said and how it is said. This lends a depth to your work that otherwise wouldn’t be there, that can keep readers coming back to see what they missed on a first read.