It was teased last month that Taylor Swift and Andrew Lloyd Webber co-wrote a new song for the upcoming Cats movie, in which Swift stars. The song is called “Beautiful Ghosts,” and the track apparently came together “spontaneously” during shooting of the movie in late 2018. Swift fans expected to hear her sing the song in the movie will be disappointed, though: In the film, Francesca Hayward, who plays Victoria, will sing the tune. However, Swift has recorded her own version of the song, which is set to play over the film’s closing credits. Ahead of then, though, Swift has shared the track today.
She spoke about the emotional piano ballad in a recent interview with Zane Lowe, saying it came about while she and Webber were rehearsing “Macavity”:
“Then he just sits at the piano and he starts playing this melody that I’ve never heard before. He’s playing this, and I’m running through all the score of ‘Cats,’ like, ‘This is not in the original musical.’ […] And I was just thinking, okay, so what if you’ve got this little kitten that’s been deserted and kind of tossed out by her owners, and she’s had to wander around the streets of London wondering where she’s going to find a home. Wouldn’t she be thinking, ‘At least you had those amazing memories’? Basically, the first line that came to me was like, ‘And the memories were lost long ago, but at least you have beautiful ghosts.’ […] I learned later that they had this beautiful piece of music, but they didn’t know what they wanted the cat to say. So I was like, ‘Got you.’ Like, ‘I know what that cat would say.'”
She also said of working on a movie in a behind-the-scenes video, “We got to update it in ways that I think are just so, so, so great. […] I just was really excited and so honored to get to be a part of this. […] This musical is timeless.”
Listen to “Beautiful Ghosts” above.
