Mastermind

Taylor Swift closes the standard edition of Midnights with this satire of her scheming ways. She starts the song by reflecting on how fate bought about her first encounter with her partner Joe Alwyn. Once upon a time, the planets and the fates And all the stars aligned You and I ended up in the same room At the same time The couple first met through serendipities, but Swift posits it was her machinations that decided their destiny together. And the touch of a hand lit the fuse Of a chain reaction of countermoves To assess the equation of you Checkmate, I couldn't lose Swift goes further on the chorus by painting herself as a calculating mastermind who planned everything, ensuring Alwyn would fall for her. What if I told you none of it was accidental? And the first night that you saw me Nothing was gonna stop me I laid the groundwork Lauren Groff's book Fates And Furies has a similar plot.

The song extends the message of Swift's Folklore track "Invisible String," where she reflects on the fates that brought about her relationship with Alwyn.

When Swift co-wrote the song with her collaborator, Jack Antonoff, she wanted to poke fun at herself. "We wanted the verse to sound like romance and this sort of heroes type of soundtrack, and then we wanted the chorus to sound like a villain has just entered the room and the idea that you're flipping this narrative, and you have been planning and plotting things and making them look like an accident," Swift said in a video. "And I think that's sort of an inside joke between me and my friends that I tend to do that. And so, this song is the romantic version of that."