ME!

“ME!” is the first single off of pop sensation Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated upcoming album: “TS7*”. Featuring indie-pop artist Brendon Urie from Panic! At The Disco, the track is filled to the brim with bubblegum pop beats and a catchy chorus, “ME!” is the future of Swift’s new sound.

Appearing to be very different from her last album release back in 2017 (“reputation”) in terms of sounds and themes, “ME!” is a self-love song aiming to teach listeners to love themselves despite all their ups and downs. Swift told Good Morning America presenter Robin Roberts about the track: “‘ME!’ is a song about embracing your individuality and really celebrating it, and owning it. I think that with a pop song, we have the ability to get a melody stuck in people’s heads, and I want it to be one that makes them feel better about themselves.” Swift also spoke to KIISFM, a LA radio station. “This song is such a celebration and it’s so playful. The ultimate main purpose of this song when I thought of this melody … I was like, ‘It’s so catchy, what do we want to get stuck in people’s head?’ And what I wanted was to make people happy about themselves because I think everyone literally is so neurotic and insecure and anxious about things, you know? … I think there should be a way for us to have a song stuck in our heads that reinforces the fact that we’re different, and obviously there are a lot of songs about ‘I’m special,’ but I hadn’t heard one recently that was about ‘I’m special because of who I am.”

Both Swift and Urie were keen to work together, with Swift commenting during the live chat of the premiere of the “ME!” music video. “Brendon has always been one of my favorite performers and I’ve always had it in the back of my mind that it would be INSANE to find the right thing to collab on and when I wrote this chorus I KNEW”. Urie expressed his happiness in an Instagram post featuring him and Taylor, with the caption stating: “Wait. This really happened?! Like for real?!?! Well I can’t begin to describe how incredible it has been to work on this song and video. So I will simply say: Thank you @taylorswift for allowing me to be a part of your beautiful story. So much fuckin love and respect. #ME!”

The music video was directed by Dave Meyers (who also directed Billie Eilish’s “bad guy”), as well as Swift herself. The music video broke YouTube records, with it receiving the most views ever in the first 24 hours for a lead female video, and is the third most viewed overall with 65.2 million views. It also broke the Vevo record of the fastest video to reach 100 millions views, achieving that in 79 hours. The video consists of both Urie and Swift in a dreamlike world, arguing with each other about their children (their cats) in French, and consistently proving their love to one another. AS of May 2019, the video has over 141 million views.

Release Date: 26th April 2019

Songwriter/s: Taylor Swift, Brendon Urie, Joel Little

Producer/s: Joel Little, Taylor Swift

Label: Republic

Music Video Release Date: 26th April 2019

Music Video Director: Dave Meyers, Taylor Swift

Chart Rankings: “ME!” hit #1 in the Scottish charts, #100 in the Billboard Hot 100, #3 in New Zealand, #3 in the UK Singles Chart, #2 in Australia, as well as making it to the Japanese, Finnish, Italian and Swedish charts.