Eager to hear the Taylor Swift/Andrew Lloyd Webber Cats collaboration? Now's your chawhnce

By Allison Shoemaker  |  November 15, 2019 | 10:40pm
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Eager to hear the Taylor Swift/Andrew Lloyd Webber Cats collaboration? Now's your chawhnce
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Taylor Swift’s had an eventful few days. Here’s another thing to add to the pile: She released the lyric video for “Beautiful Ghosts,” the track she “spontaneously” wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber for the film version of the musical Cats, which is itself an adaptation of a book of poems about cats by T.S. Eliot. It’s a lot, and friends, so is this.

“Beautiful Ghosts,” for which Swift wrote the lyrics “then and there” after hearing the melody for the first time, will be sung in Tom Hooper’s film by a character called Victoria The White Cat, a white cat (named Victoria) played by Francesa Hayward. Swift’s version will play over the end credits; its inclusion in the film means she’s eligible for a songwriting Oscar nomination. For Cats. What a time to be alive.

The lyric video features imagery of a dancer-cat-person-monster doing some cat-dancing atop various London rooftops while tiny white lights stream upwards. Are they stars floating toward the sky? Are they the souls of dead cats high-tailing it for the Heavyside Layer? It’s unclear. Also unclear: That accent. Chawnces? Chonces? Chuhnces?

The song arrives in the film as a response to the big ballad “Memory,” though we’ll obviously need a lot more context about “Victoria The White Cat” to know what exactly is happening here. But hey, it’s pretty!

 
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