Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 02/14/2012 at 5:41 PM Videos

The Popdust Files: music videos, safe and sound, taylor swift, the hunger games

Taylor Swift’s “Safe and Sound” doesn’t sound much like the meatier tracks that make up her solo repertoire (fittingly; it’s a duet with The Civil Wars and sounds a lot like them.) Nor is her video much like a Taylor Swift video; it’s essentially one long paean to The Hunger Games, which will make a lot of sense if you’ve read the books. It works if you haven’t read the books, too; there’s plenty of scenery for Swift to brood amongst. But that sentence probably really irritated fans, because let’s face it: this video is meant as a direct tie-in. Or an “infomercial,” as Swift told MTV:

Having a music video with that much symbolism in it is something I’m not used to,” Swift continued. “Everyone who is a ‘Hunger Games’ fans knows what it means when there’s fire in the trees and they know what it means for the house to be burnt and they know what it means for the ‘Hunger Games’ pin to be covered in rust and old. Everybody can take their own meaning away from it, but it all goes back to the symbolism of the book.

MTV has some only slightly spoilery details at their site; in the meanwhile, the video is below.