Taylor Swift’s ‘Only the Young’ May Be Her Most Politically Charged Song Yet
Taylor Swift's upcoming Miss Americana Netflix documentary comes with a song she wrote about the 2018 midterm elections.
“You did all that you could do / The game was rigged, the ref got tricked / The wrong ones think they’re right / We were outnumbered — this time," Swift sings in "Only the Young."
The news comes in a Variety cover story about Swift that details the upcoming film. The song's inspiration came directly after the results of the elections. Swift was upset that Tennessee elected Marsha Blackburn after she wrote an open letter to her followers in 2018 about Blackburn's previous voting history, in which she voted against equal pay for women and against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
“It was hard to see so many people feel like they had canvassed and done everything and tried so hard," the "Lover" singer explains. "I saw a lot of young people’s hopes dashed. And I found that to be particularly tragic, because young people are the people who feel the worst effects of gun violence, and student loans and trying to figure out how to start their lives and how to pay their bills, and climate change, and are we going to war — all these horrific situations that we find ourselves facing right now."
"I just wanted to write a song about it," Swift shares. "I didn’t know where it would end up. But I did think that it would be better for it to come out at a time that it could maybe hopefully stoke some fires politically and maybe engage younger people to form their own views, break away from the pack, and not feel like they need to vote exactly the same way that people in their town are voting."
Variety reports that the upcoming documentary will show Swift creating and demoing the song before the finished product plays during the end credits. Swift assures that it will be available for purchase and streaming, though it will not be a single or have a music video.
Swift co-wrote and co-produced "Only the Young" alongside Joel Little, who most recently worked with her on her seventh studio album, Lover. The pair created the song during the cycle for the album after they wrote "The Man" and "ME!" while in New York City. The song features Little's two daughters, who had no idea that they were recording for a song of Swift's.
"They actually don’t even know that it’s going to be in the documentary yet, so I’m excited for them to hear it.” (Let’s hope they aren’t reading it here first)," Little tells Variety.
Miss Americana debuts on Netflix on Jan. 31.
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