Taylor Swift surprised her fans this week with a brand new single.
The pop star finally released her chilling, sparse new track titled “Carolina” from the soundtrack for the forthcoming film Where the Crawdads Sing after previously teasing the song in the film’s trailer released back in March. The song, which is written and sung by Swift and produced by her frequent collaborator Aaron Dessner, parallels the plot line and general ambiance of the film, telling the story of a woman quietly sneaking through the landscape unnoticed. The bestselling 2018 novel by the same name tells the story of Kya—played by Daisy Edgar-Jones on screen—a young girl abandoned by her family in the marshes of North Carolina where she learns to fend for herself and eventually falls in love with a local boy who she will later be accused of killing.
On Thursday, Swift shared a lyric video for her new song on Instagram set to scenes from Where the Crawdads Sing. She wrote in the caption, “About a year and half ago I wrote a song about an incredible story, the story of a girl who always lived on the outside, looking in. Figuratively and literally. The juxtaposition of her loneliness and independence. Her longing and her stillness. Her curiosity and fear, all tangled up. Her persisting gentleness…and the world’s betrayal of it. I wrote this one alone in the middle of the night and then [Aaron Dessner] and I meticulously worked on a sound that we felt would be authentic to the moment in time when this story takes place. I made a wish that one day you would hear it. ‘Carolina’ is out now.”
When the trailer first came out in March, the singer also enthused over how much she loved the book and the process of writing this song. “Where The Crawdads Sing is a book I got absolutely lost in when I read it years ago,” Swift began. “As soon as I heard there was a film in the works starring the incredible [Daisy Edgar-Jones] and produced by the brilliant [Reese Witherspoon], I knew I wanted to be a part of it from the musical side. I wrote the song ‘Carolina’ alone and asked my friend [Aaron Dessner] to produce it. I wanted to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerizing story.”