meet me where the spirit meets the bones

“I’m going to debunk that [idea that those vocals are designed to sound like The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness]. 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-when you listen to the song, you'll hear her doing that. But then she actually said, 'What if that went at the beginning of the song?' Taylor is interesting when she records, because she has kind of mapped it out in her head. Part of it like, comes naturally to her. It's also because she's been thinking about it. But she'11 come in and kind of have a whole architecture in her head that she's going to chase down, and that was one of those things. But then we were like, 'Oh, wow, That's so beautiful. What if it comes at the beginning?' And then she kind of sang more to it.”

in honour of national snake day, we should circle back to when taylor said this in her 30 things i learned before turning 30 essay

“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.”