Taylor Swift teams up with The National for some more angst

On a recent stop of The Eras Tour, Taylor Swift described The National’s Aaron Dessner as the “collaborator version of a soulmate.” After releasing folklore, evermore, a couple of Big Red Machine tracks and Midnights’ 3 A.M addendum together, the prolific duo is back with a new track. This time it’s a duet called “Alcott” for The National’s brand new album First Two Pages Of Frankenstein.

“Alcott” marks Swift’s second duet with The National (and frontman Matt Berninger specifically) following the evermore song “coney island.” However, this new entry in the canon may share slightly more in common with “exile,” a collaboration between Swift, Dessner, and Bon Iver (plus William Bowery, a.k.a. Swift’s ex Joe Alwyn). Both give a sense of conversational call and response, where two lovers’ ideas of a relationship overlap and contradict. What all three tracks certainly share is a heavy dose of angst. And if you’re a Swiftie who preferred the sound of the “folkmore” era to the pop-forward Midnights, this is definitely the song for you.

The National recently explained its shared custody of Dessner’s melodies in an interview with The Telegraph, where Berninger revealed, “I’d taken a swing at [‘Cardigan’] and ‘Willow’ and a couple of others, and I wasn’t having a lot of luck, so Aaron sent them to Taylor.” He added, “I always have a lot of music to work on, and I am looking for something to connect emotionally. The reverse has happened, too, where Aaron wrote something for Taylor, and I dove right in. It works both ways.”

In the case of “The Alcott,” Berninger had written lyrics to the track when Dessner sent it over to Swift, who “quickly rewrote it” to add her own lyrics. “[There] was something about that song I thought she’d really respond to,” Dessner told Vulture. “Something about her phrasing … you can hear it even in the original voice note. She’s not coloring it in; she’s fully another character in the story. It makes sense. In the verse, Matt is talking about finding someone and they’re writing in their golden notebook. In a way, I was like, Is that Taylor? Who is it? Or is it some fictional character? She inhabits this story as her own character. That makes it a true feature.”