Songfacts®:

• Taylor Swift opens her Midnights album with this upbeat R&B song where she sings about protecting her relationship with Joe Alwyn from unsolicited scrutiny. "My relationship for six years, we've had to dodge weird rumors, tabloid stuff, and we just ignore it," Swift explained in an Instagram video. "So this song is sort of about the act of ignoring that stuff to protect the real stuff."
• I feel the lavender haze creeping up on me
  Surreal
  
  The song title comes from a phrase used in the 1950s to describe being in love. Swift heard it while watching AMC's show Mad Men. "If you were in the lavender haze, then that meant that you were in that all-encompassing love glow, and I thought that was really beautiful," she explained on Instagram.
  
  "I think a lot of people have to deal with this now, not just like 'public figures,' because we live in the era of social media," she added. "And if the world finds out that you're in love with somebody, they're gonna weigh in on it."
• All they keep asking me
  Is if I'm gonna be your bride
  
  Swift doesn't go along with the 1950s stereotype that two people in love will inevitably get married and have children.
• Swift wrote "Lavender Haze" with:
  
  Her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff.
  
  Her friend Zoe Kravitz. The daughter of musician Lenny Kravitz, singer and actress Zoe Kravitz fronts the R&B and electro-pop duo Lolawolf alongside Jimmy Giannopoulos. Kravitz was working on an album with Antonoff when she contributed to "Lavender Haze."
  
  Longtime Kendrick Lamar beatmaker Mark Anthony Spears (aka the producer Sounwave).
  
  Julliard-trained producer Jahaan Sweet (Eminem's "Lucky You," A Boogie Wit Da Hoodies's "Drowning (Water)," Post Malone's "Saint-Tropez").
  
  Chicago singer-songwriter Sam Dew. He co-wrote 12 tracks on Kendrick Lamar's Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers album and also sang on the record. Sounwave and Sam Dew are members of Antonoff's musical project Red Hearse. They released their self-titled debut studio album in August 2019.
  
  Antonoff, Sounwave and Jahaan Sweet also produced the track.
• Swift first announced Midnights at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards. She described the album as a "journey through terrors and sweet dreams," inspired by "13 sleepless nights" of her life.
• Before Antonoff started on Midnights, he was working on tracks with Sounwave, Dew, and Zoë Kravitz. During one session, they cooked up a track that would eventually become "Lavender Haze."
  
  "It was not specifically meant for anything," Sounwave recalled to Rolling Stone. "That one was me going through sounds for 15 minutes and eventually hitting one button by accident. Jack's eyes lit up and was like, 'What was that?' It just happened to be this small little loop that my guy Jahaan sent me a while back."
  
  Sounwave edited the loop and added some effects to make it sound the way it does now. Dew wrote some melodies to the loop with Zoë Kravitz. "Zoë is actually a creative genius," he said. "She's not just a phenomenal actor. Her ability to create different sonics and find different melodies is next level."
  
  A few months later, Antonoff pitched the song to Swift, who wrote the lyrics.
• Taylor Swift wrote and directed the video herself. The clip naturally starts with the singer waking up at midnight. We then see Swift in various purple environments, such as watching TV in a purple fur coat, moving through a field of wildflowers in her own living room, performing a dance routine in a room filled with violet smoke, and lounging in a milky lilac-colored bath. Transgender activist and actor Laith Ashley De La Cruz cameos as Swift's love interest.
• The video was the third Swift released for a Midnights track, following the visuals for "Anti-Hero" and "Bejeweled." It's the first out of the three that she wrote. "This one really helped me conceptualize the world and mood of Midnights, like a sultry sleepless '70s fever dream," Swift said.
• Taylor Swift dropped a dance heavy remix crafted by Felix Jaehn. German producer Jaehn's resumé includes helming OMI's 2015 #1 hit "Cheerleader."