Taylor Swift is gearing up to release her first all-new song since 2020, with ‘Carolina’ set to arrive later today.
The track, which was composed for the forthcoming Olivia Newman-directed film, Where The Crawdads Sing, was confirmed to be arriving today via a post on Swift’s Instagram story. Much like releases by Beyoncé and Drake in recent days, the single is expected to arrive at midnight ET, which equates to 2pm on Friday, 24th June.
‘Carolina’ has been teased for some time now, with the track being used to soundtrack the trailer to Where The Crawdads Sing, which itself is adapted from the 2018 novel by Delia Owens, and focuses on the life of a young girl in North Carolina between between 1952 and 1969.
As Variety reports, Newman and Reese Witherspoon – who produced the film – gave some insight into the creation of the song in a recent interview, explaining how Swift recorded the track in one take, utilising only instruments that were available in the ’50s.
“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,” explained Witherspoon.
As indicated by Witherspoon’s comments, ‘Carolina’ utilises the same team that Swift worked with during the recording of her 2020 album, Folklore. Commenting on the track back in March, Swift explained that she was inspired by the “haunting” and “ethereal” nature of the story, working on the track solo before enlisting The National’s Aaron Dessner on production.
“Where The Crawdads Sing is a book I got absolutely lost in when I read it years ago,” Swift explained. “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 mesmerising story.”
Though serving as her first original piece of music since 2020, ‘Carolina’ is far from the most recent music we’ve heard from Taylor Swift, with Red (Taylor’s Version) – the re-recording of her 2012 album, Red – arriving back in November to critical and commercial acclaim.
