Hear a snippet of Taylor Swift and Andrew Lloyd Webber's new Cats song
Taylor Swift isn’t just singing, dancing, and sprinkling catnip in the much-anticipated Cats movie; she’s also using her songwriting talents for a new, Jellicle-approved track.
Swift and original Cats composer Andrew Lloyd Webber have co-written a new song for the movie, titled “Beautiful Ghosts.” Universal released a behind-the-scenes featurette Thursday with a short clip of the new track. In the film, the white cat Victoria (played by dancer Francesca Hayward) sings “Beautiful Ghosts,” while Swift has also recorded her own studio version, which will be played over the end credits.
Webber wrote the music, while Swift handled the lyrics, taking inspiration from the original T.S. Eliot poetry used in the original musical.
“T.S. Eliot is such a specific type of writer and uses such specific language [and] imagery, and so reading through his work and everything, I just really wanted to reflect that,” Swift says in the behind-the-scenes footage. “You can’t write a modern lyric for Cats. So if you can’t get T.S. Eliot, you get T.S.”
Swift plays Bombalurina in Tom Hooper’s feline extravaganza, which also stars Jennifer Hudson, Judi Dench, Idris Elba, Ian McKellen, Jason Derulo, James Corden, and Rebel Wilson.
“I just fully committed and threw myself into the process and had the most fun,” Swift previously told EW of filming Cats. “We had this thing called ‘cat school’ that was a class where you could learn about how to create the motions of cats, how to think like they think, how to sense things the way that they do, carry yourself the way a cat would. I learned a lot.”
Cats will hit theaters Dec. 20.
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