Taylor Swift reveals her biggest fear on Midnights – elevators

Taylor Swift made several revelations with the release of her latest album, Midnights. From celebrity feuds to her relationship status with her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, Swift laid it all out on the table -- including one previously unknown fact about herself: she hates elevators.

The singer-songwriter makes her fears known on the album’s tenth track, “Labyrinth”. Swift sings: “Breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out / I’ll be getting over you my whole life / You know how scared I am of elevators / Never trust it if it rises fast / It can’t last.”

Of course, this is the first her Swifties have heard of this fear (and they know everything). In 2014, Swift posted a picture of herself in her Halloween costume – a pegacorn – while standing in an elevator. She played a ditzy blonde in the 2010 film Valentine’s Day, where she stood in an elevator with Julia Garner. She magically appeared in an elevator – courtesy of magician David Copperfield – at the 2009 American Country Music Awards. And Swift has snapped many selfies in elevators with her “Bad Blood” squad.

It’s quite possible Taylor Swift has taken some creative liberties with this track, and she might not hate elevators at all. But this isn’t the first time she’s referenced her fear of falling too quickly. In the song “gold rush” off her 2020 album evermore, she said: “I don’t like that falling feels like flying ‘til the bone crush / Everybody wants you / But I don’t like a gold rush.”

Either she is afraid to fall in love too quickly, or maybe she just has vertigo.

Taylor Swift is known to drop easter eggs for her fans, and unsurprisingly, she has quoted these lyrics from “Labyrinth” before. During her commencement speech for the graduates of New York University’s class of 2022, Swift recited lyrics from the song months before the release of Midnights.

“Hard things will happen to us, we will recover, we will learn from it, we will grow more resilient because of it, and as long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing, we will breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, and breathe out,” she said during her speech, where she received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree.

The lyrics of “Labyrinth” are also quite similar to another Swift lyric from the track “epiphany”, off her 2020 album, folklore. “Watch you breathe in / Watch you breathing out, out,” she sings. There’s always a hidden meaning to every Swift song. Maybe she’s just trying to tell us that she has asthma too.

The singer-songwriter released her 10th studio album, Midnights, at midnight on 21 October. In true Swift fashion, she followed this up with the release of a deluxe album – which included seven additional tracks – called Midnights (3am Edition).

In The Independent’s five-star review, the album is described as Swift’s “darkest and most cryptic yet”, with reviewer Helen Brown advising listeners to “Turn the lights off and let these songs prowl around you”.