“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. It was like a hockey arena in Germany or something, and it was an awful, awful situation, but then that's me patting my leg, like playing drums on my leg, which I often do, which I kind of learned over time that if you record yourself like, 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 the, what is me like, playing my thigh essentially, that it reminded her of someone walking on cobblestones in high heels, like, unevenly, and that gave her an image in her mind which sort of like, led her into the narrative that she wrote.”
— Aaron Dessner on Switched On Pop about the Cardigan introduction (x)
