Taylor Swift has released “Carolina,” her first original track since the release of 2020’s evermore. It’s the theme song to the new film Where the Crawdads Sing and you can stream it below.
On the track, Swift’s vocals arrive as if through a fog, while dramatic drums ripple underneath. “They never saw me,” she sings, “You didn’t see me here/ No, they never did see me here/ There are places I will never, ever go/ Things that only Carolina will ever know.”
Where the Crawdads Sing is adapted from the 2018 novel of the same name by Delia Owens. Swift was a big fan of the book, and when she heard that producer Reese Witherspoon and director Olivia Newman intended to bring it to the silver screen, she submitted “Carolina” unprompted.
“She had gone and written this song out of just pure inspiration and sort of said, ‘I don’t know if you’ll like it, but here it is,’” Newman said in a June 13th roundtable (via Variety). Swift performed the song using all instruments available before 1953, when the first part of the book is set, and recorded everything in one take to maintain historical fidelity.
According to Witherspoon, “She read this book and loved it so much, and then she heard we were making a movie [during the period] she was making her folklore album and then she wrote a song with that whole folklore team, which was so haunting and magical and beautiful.”
“Carolina” is produced by Aaron Dessner of The National, with whom Swift worked on folklore and evermore. In a statement, she wrote, “I wanted to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerizing story.”
Where the Crawdads Sing arrives in theaters July 15th. Check out the official trailer below.
In recent months, Swift has been going through her old discography, and in May she released “This Love (Taylor’s Version),” a likely preview of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) that we named Song of the Week. Since then she’s delivered NYU’s commencement speech, expressed her “unbearable heartbreak” at the Uvalde school shooting, and got Robert De Nero to admit that he might be a Swiftie.