Taylor Swift Explains the Story Behind Her New Song ‘Carolina’ – And Why It’s Taken So Long to Come Out

Hannah Dailey
·2 min read
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After it was announced in March that Taylor Swift would be contributing an original song, “Carolina,” to the Where the Crawdads Sing film soundtrack, fans ended up having to wait more than three months before they finally got to listen to the full thing. But, as it turns out, Swift had to wait a whole year and a half.

The 32-year-old pop star went on Twitter upon the song’s long-awaited release Friday morning (June 24) to explain the story of “Carolina,” from the lyrics she wrote to how bad she’s been wanting fans to hear them since she finished the song well over a year ago. “About a year & half ago I wrote a song about the story of a girl who always lived on the outside, looking in,” she began.

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“Figuratively & literally. The juxtaposition of her loneliness & independence. Her curiosity & fear all tangled up. Her persisting gentleness & the world’s betrayal of it.”

The song is written from the point of view of the main character in Where the Crawdads Sing, Kya, an abandoned girl (played by Daisy Edgar Jones) who learns to survive by herself in the North Carolina marshlands and often suffers harassment from the nearby townspeople. The film was inspired by Delia Owens’ novel of the same name, which, upon reading, inspired Swift to fully craft “Carolina” with Folklore collaborator Aaron Dessner before ever pitching it to the film’s producers.

“I wrote this one alone in the middle of the night and then @AaronDessner and I meticulously worked on a sound that we felt would be authentic to the moment when this story takes place,” Swift continued in her new tweets, also posting a “Carolina” lyric video featuring clips from the film. “I made a wish that one day you would hear it. ‘Carolina’ is out now.”

The “All Too Well” singer had previously talked about her songwriting process for “Carolina” back in March when she first announced the song via social media. “Where the Crawdads Sing is a book I got absolutely lost in when I read it years ago,” she’d written on Instagram. “I wanted to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerizing story.”

Read Taylor Swift’s tweets about her new Where The Crawdads Sing song “Carolina” below:

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