They Said The End Is Coming

Taylor Swift “Sweet Nothing (Piano Remix)”

The Taylor Swift songs that have connected with me the most over her past few records are the ones that offer a window into her steady long term relationship with Joe Alwyn, her songwriting collaborator on a handful of songs including “Sweet Nothing,” my clear favorite on Midnights. Swift is famous for writing about big tumultuous romantic dramas, but songs like this and “Invisible String,” “Peace,” and “Lover” find something deep and affecting in much smaller moments. These are the songs with the biggest stakes and she focuses on the fragility of this happiness in each of them, and in the case of “Sweet Nothing” and “Peace” she dwells on how her extraordinary life puts this intimacy in constant peril. The sweet low key romantic scenes in this song get crowded out by paranoia in the chorus – “they said the end is coming, everyone is up to something” – and a fear of slimy entertainment industry creeps in the bridge. But the point of the song is that this relationship is her refuge from all that, something solid and real and dependable in a life otherwise full of conflicting pressures and people who know who she is but don’t really know her.

I like both versions of “Sweet Nothing,” though I strongly prefer the “piano remix” found on the Target edition of Midnights. The song is something of an outlier on the album both musically and thematically so the arrangement of the proper album version has the neon lights palette of the rest of the record. The piano part sounds cuter, the high notes twinkling like little Christmas lights. The “piano remix” shifts everything closer to a Folklore palette, though the strings and woodwinds that add color and weight to the arrangement have a tonality I don’t think she’s approached before – gracefulness but not grandeur, downplaying drama but highlighting a wounded humility. I’m glad Swift thought enough of this song to make sure it was included on the main version of the album, but this more low key and earthy version feels more “accurate” to the mood and sentiment of the piece.

Buy it from Target.