Taylor Swift's pin-sharp new album, "Midnights," closes with a song in which the pop superstar patiently explains to someone — perhaps many millions of someones — that their intimate relationship wasn't a product of kismet but of design.
"I laid the groundwork," she sings over a blippy electronic groove, her voice edging slightly ahead of the beat, "and then just like clockwork the dominoes cascaded in a line." The tune is called "Mastermind," which is what Swift calls herself in the chorus, neatly rhyming the word with "now you're mine." And plenty of its characteristic detail can make you think she's describing a romance. But "Mastermind" is also about Swift's one-of-a-kind career — about the deliberation and the ingenuity of the moves that took the 32-year-old from being a teenage country phenom to being one of the two or three biggest acts in all of music.
"No one wanted to play with me as a little kid," she sings near the end of "Mastermind," which might be the saddest and funniest line on an LP teeming with both kinds, "so I've been scheming like a criminal ever since to make them love me and make it seem effortless." (Take a second to savor the intricate rhythm of those words before you've even heard them set to music.)
