Songfacts®:

• Taylor Swift closes the standard edition of Midnights with this satire of her scheming ways. She starts the song by reflecting on how fate bought about her first encounter with her partner Joe Alwyn.
  
  Once upon a time, the planets and the fates
  And all the stars aligned
  You and I ended up in the same room
  At the same time
  
  The couple first met through serendipities, but Swift posits it was her machinations that decided their destiny together.
  
  And the touch of a hand lit the fuse
  Of a chain reaction of countermoves
  To assess the equation of you
  Checkmate, I couldn't lose
  
  Swift goes further on the chorus by painting herself as a calculating mastermind who planned everything, ensuring Alwyn would fall for her.
  
  What if I told you none of it was accidental?
  And the first night that you saw me
  Nothing was gonna stop me
  I laid the groundwork
  
  Lauren Groff's book Fates And Furies has a similar plot.
• The song extends the message of Swift's Folklore track "Invisible String," where she reflects on the fates that brought about her relationship with Alwyn.
• When Swift co-wrote the song with her collaborator, Jack Antonoff, she wanted to poke fun at herself. "We wanted the verse to sound like romance and this sort of heroes type of soundtrack, and then we wanted the chorus to sound like a villain has just entered the room and the idea that you're flipping this narrative, and you have been planning and plotting things and making them look like an accident," Swift said in a video. "And I think that's sort of an inside joke between me and my friends that I tend to do that. And so, this song is the romantic version of that."
• Swift felt different from the other kids at school and had few friends. She discusses her loneliness in her tween and early teenage years on her 2006 track "The Outside." During this song's bridge, Swift suggests her manipulative behavior stems from being unpopular as a child.
  
  No one wanted to play with me as a little kid
  So I've been scheming like a criminal ever since
  To make them love me and make it seem effortless
• Swifties fondly call the singer a "mastermind" for her careful planning of Easter eggs and releases. On the final chorus, Swift replaces the line "I knew your body" with "nothing was gonna stop me," thereby switching it away from its original romantic meaning. Now the pop star is confessing to a calculated approach to her music career that enthuses her fans and makes them love her.
• Swift co-produced "Sweet Nothings" with Jack Antonoff. The New York producer/musician also played synthesizer, electric guitar, percussion and drums on the track. Antonoff bought in members of his rock project Bleachers to assist him on Midnights. For "Sweet Nothings," Evan Smith contributed saxophone and synthesizer; Mikey Hart, synthesizer; Mike Riddleberger, drums; Zem Audu, saxophone; Bobby Hawk, violin.
• Taylor Swift was inspired to write "Mastermind" after watching Paul Thomas Anderson's Daniel Day-Lewis-starring film Phantom Thread and being drawn by its twist ending.
  
  "Remember that last scene?" she asked Time. "I thought, wouldn't it be fun to have a lyric about being calculated... It's something that's been thrown at me like a dagger, but now I take it as a compliment."