When Taylor Swift announced her surprise new album folklore two weeks ago, she revealed that physical editions would contain a bonus cut titled ‘the lakes’. Now that CDs and vinyls are reaching stores, that song has officially been unveiled, though the physical-only cut still remains off streaming services.
‘The Lakes’ was co-written and co-produced by longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, and unlike much of folklore, The National’s Aaron Dessner was not involved in the making of the track. It’s named after the Lake District in the United Kingdom, a place popularized by Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. It finds her yearning for a simpler time: “A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground with no one around to tweet it,” she sings, “While I bathe in cliffside pools with my calamitous love and insurmountable grief.” She also refers to someone, presumably longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn, as her “muse”.
folklore recently became the top-selling album of 2020. Last week, Taylor Swift also unveiled the “cabin in the candlelight” version of lead single ‘cardigan’.
