Taylor Swift Releases Emotional New Song 'Carolina' from 'Where the Crawdads Sing'

Swifties, get ready to hit repeat on this track!

Taylor Swift fans will be hitting repeat on her new single, "Carolina," to kick off the weekend. The 32-year-old singer released the track at midnight on Friday and the ballad is haunting. 

"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," Swift detailed in an Instagram post with the song. "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 @aarondessner and I meticulously worked on a sound that we felt would be authentic to the moment in time when this story takes place," she added. "I made a wish that one day you would hear it. ‘Carolina’ is out now."

Swift teased the song -- which will appear in the upcoming film Where the Crawdads Sing — three months ago along with the trailer for the movie. Carolina is Swift's first newly written original song since 2020.

"Where The Crawdads Sing is a book I got absolutely lost in when I read it years ago. As soon as I heard there was a film in the works starring the incredible @daisyedgarjones and produced by the brilliant @reesewitherspoon, I knew I wanted to be a part of it from the musical side," Swift explained at the time of what the song means to her. "I wrote the song 'Carolina' alone and asked my friend @aarondessner to produce it. I wanted to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerizing story. You’ll hear it fully soon, but for now check out the @crawdadsmovie trailer for a clip!"

On the second verse of the track, Swift sings the chilling lyrics, "Carolina stains on the dress she left / Indelible scars, pivotal marks / Blue as the life she fled / Carolina pines, won't you cover me? / Hide me like robes down the back road / Muddy these webs we weave."

The song sets the perfect tone for Where The Crawdads Sing, an Olivia Newman-directed film based on Delia Owens's 2018 novel which is "at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder," according to the book's description.

The film -- set to be released on July 15 -- stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya, a "woman who raised herself in the marshes of the deep South" who "becomes a suspect in the murder of a man she was once involved with."

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