Taylor Swift is known to be a lyrical genius but her production talents are often the unsung heroes in her discography, as her frequent collaborator Aaron Dessner revealed in a new interview.
The 36-year-old pop superstar and The Nationals frontman have worked together on over 60 songs and he talked about her mastery behind some of the final recordings.
Dessner shared the backstory to Swift’s song So Long, London from The Tortured Poets Department, saying, “It’s a good story how this happened. Taylor was, she actually arranged those vocals to go at the end of the song. So she was doing those choral, like these angelic choral parts over the end of the last chorus of the song that you hear.”
He continued, “When you listen to the song, you’ll hear her doing that. But then she actually said, but what if that went at the beginning of the song? Taylor is interesting when she records because she’s mapped it out in her head.”
The Alcott hitmaker gave another example, this time from cardigan from her album, folklore, and shared, “That one’s interesting. It’s actually what you hear when that song starts, you hear the air conditioning in the backstage of an arena in Germany where The National was playing where I wrote it because it was really cold. But then that’s me patting my leg, playing drums on my leg, which I often do, which I learned over time that if you record yourself playing surfaces or your body and record it with an iPhone, it just sounds cool. I wrote the music first and Taylor wrote to it. I think she said that when she heard that sound of what is me playing my thigh, essentially, that it reminded her of someone walking on cobble stones and high heels unevenly, and that gave her an image in her mind that led her into the narrative that she wrote.”
2026-07-17 18:27:00
