Taylor Swift – “Only The Young”

Taylor Swift’s new documentary Miss Americana arrives on Netflix tonight, after debuting at the Sundance Film Festival last week, and it comes along with a new song called “Only The Young.” Like the documentary itself, it finds Swift reckoning with the current political climate and her place in it. “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,” she sings on it.

In a Variety interview about her documentary, she talked about writing the song while she was disillusioned:

I wrote it after the midterm elections, when there were so many young people who rallied for their candidate, whether it was a senator or congressman or congresswoman. It was hard to see so many people feel like they had canvassed and done everything and tried so hard. 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.

Swift co-wrote and co-produced “Only The Young” with Joel Little, the producer who made his name working with Lorde and worked with Swift on a number of tracks on her most recent album Lover. Listen to it below.