Taylor Swift is coming off two quietly big years in music, as the singer dropped two surprise albums (folklore and evermore) in 2020 while in quarantine and then re-released two of her beloved albums (Fearless and Red) this past year. Swift is of course not stopping there, as she shared earlier this year she wrote a brand new song for Where The Crawdads Sing. Ahead of the movie’s release, we have the details about how “Carolina” came to be.
CinemaBlend and a select few journalists had the chance to visit Sony Pictures Entertainment to see a chunk of Where The Crawdads Sing and speak with the film’s director Olivia Newman. During the roundtable interview, the filmmaker shared how Taylor Swift’s upcoming song happened. In her words:
She had read and loved the book so much that she felt compelled to write a song for it. It was before we had even shot the movie and when I heard the song, I couldn't believe it was totally so perfect. I think it is so beautiful and every time the movie ends and that song comes on, it captures the feeling you have at the end of the movie where you need to sit and digest what just happened. And the song is like the perfect transport for those feelings, it really sets the, exactly the right tone, but it was very serendipitous in that way because we hadn't shot the movie yet. For it to be such a perfect match was a gift. What a gift.
Taylor Swift is an avid reader and was apparently a huge fan of Delia Owens’ best-selling novel Where The Crawdads Sing, which was published in 2018 and has been on the The New Times Fiction Best Sellers list for a combined 150 non-consecutive weeks. In recent months, Owens’ thriller remains has returned to the list, with Swifties most definitely part of the book’s continued craze. Olivia Newman also said this:
She has a huge following and I'm so excited that it's going to open doors for even more people to discover the book, because I think everybody should read the book. It's great.
Back in March, just ahead of the first Where The Crawdads Sing trailer dropping and including a clip of “Carolina,” Taylor Swift announced in her first Instagram post of 2022 of the song. She shared that she got “absolutely lost in it” when she read it years ago. She mentioned that she knew she wanted to be part of the project when she heard of the movie, citing her love for Fresh actress Daisy Edgar-Jones and producer Reese Witherspoon.
It’s wild that Taylor Swift actually wrote “Carolina” before the movie had even been shot. From what we’ve heard, the song definitely fits the tone of the film wonderfully, as Olivia Newman shared. Swift sounds like she really understood and was inspired by the material in Where The Crawdads Sing.
Here's the new movie's full trailer:
The singer has written original songs for many soundtracks over the years, including for another book-to-movie adaptation, 2012’s The Hunger Games. And after seeing Taylor Swift create her own stories (rather than biographical love and breakup tracks) in her recent music, it’s no wonder she’s jumping at writing songs for more movies.
Where The Crawdads Sing is an upcoming 2022 movie heading exclusively to theaters on July 15. You can learn more about what we know about the movie adaptation of Delia Owens’ bestseller here on CinemaBlend.
