The countdown to “Midnights” continues.
Fresh off of being honored as Songwriter-Artist of the Decade at the Nashville Songwriter Awards on Tuesday night, Taylor Swift revealed the first song title from her much-anticipated 10th studio album — due Oct. 21 — in a TikTok video posted, naturally, at the stroke of midnight.
Having previously only revealed that there were 13 tracks on “Midnights,” the 11-time Grammy winner debuted “Midnights Mayhem With Me” as a way to roll out the song titles with a lottery-style cage containing balls marked 1 through 13.
“I know I have a habit of dropping cryptic clues and Easter eggs when giving you information about new music, and I’m not here to deny that — I’m here to defy that,” she says in the TikTok. “Welcome to a series I’m calling ‘Midnights Mayhem With Me.’ I am going to be using this technologically advanced device to help me allow fate to decide exactly what tracks titles I’m going to be announcing and in what order.”
The 32-year-old entertainer then draws the first ball from the cage, and it just so happens to be for Track 13 — which any good Swiftie knows is Tay Tay’s lucky number.
“The first track I’m going to tell you about is Track 13, because, of course,” says Swift, who then picks up a red phone and reveals that “Track 13 is called ‘Mastermind.’ ”
And that title tease is all that eager fans get for now, and they will need to calm down and wait for what will presumably be 12 more videos — which are sure to be dropped at the witching hour — before getting the full track listing for “Midnights.”
But Swift wasn’t playing it so coy when she accepted her Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honor at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, which took place at Music City’s Ryman Auditorium on Tuesday night.
“Writing songs is a calling, and getting to call it your career makes you very lucky,” said Swift, who, of course, got her start in Nashville as a country artist. “You have to be grateful every day for it — and [for] all the people who thought your words might be worth listening to, this town is the school that taught me that.”
Swift — who got her own songwriter page on Spotify earlier this week — then sang the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” that won her a record third Video of the Year trophy at the MTV Video Music Awards last month. And it was during her acceptance speech that the superstar first announced the upcoming release of “Midnights.”