Meet her at midnight: The music video for “Lavender Haze,” the first track from Taylor Swift’s highly-anticipated album Midnights, has finally been released almost three months after the record’s drop. She has previously cited the lyrics from her song as referring to her relationship with Joe Alwyn at the time.
The Lavender Haze video is out now. There is lots of lavender. There is lots of haze. There is my incredible costar @laith_ashley who I absolutely adored working with.https://t.co/auFTSVBP0A pic.twitter.com/RXWPuKvkxK
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) January 27, 2023
Released last October, she vowed that Midnights would be spent exploring her deepest vulnerabilities, feelings of remorse, shame, and dreams of retaliation—the kinds of things that would keep anyone up long beyond their bedtime. However, unlike most of us, Swift made those tense moments lovely. After all, she says this is “a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.”
Three hours after her new album’s midnight release, she surprised fans again by announcing that she was going to release even more music: a 7-track companion piece that is an extension of the album. Even more, as Swift announced just before the midnight release, the record is actually a visual album: a project with which all songs have their own music videos. She collaborated with “All Too Well: The Short Film” cinematographer Rina Yang for “music movies” that feature Laura Dern, HAIM, Pat McGrath, Jack Antonoff, and more, all of which are meant to help fans explore the world of Midnights. So far, three songs (“Anti-Hero”, “Bejeweled”, and “Lavender Haze”) have been released in their respective video form, all directed by Swift.
Written by Swift herself, the striking psychedelic video shows her meandering through her house in a hypnotic trance while flowers grow out of the floor and her house glides through space with her love interest, who is portrayed by transgender actor and activist Laith Ashley De La Cruz. Swift moves freely through a variety of purple-hued environments: she dances in violet smoke at a social gathering, crawls among lavender wildflowers in her living room, bathes in lilac milk, and floats on a thistle cloud in a shimmering koi fish cosmo.
This will not be the last of Swfit’s directorial-and-written efforts: The artist will soon make her feature film directing debut for Searchlight Pictures, a division of the Walt Disney Company for specialized films. The company is creating a screen adaptation of an original screenplay the 32-year-old superstar created herself. Details of the project have been under wraps and will be announced in the near future.
