Taylor Swift - willow (Official Music Video)

Coney Island in the winter is a completely different place than during summertime, when it's a brightly lit beachside amusement park.

In the song "coney island," featuring The National, Taylor Swift brings her listeners to the wintertime side of New York's infamous seaside paradise, inviting us to join her on a bench as she mourns the bitter end of a marriage and the end of a season.

One of the song's best lines is sung by The National's Matt Berniger, whose bass voice never fails to haunt. "The question pounds my head / What's a lifetime of achievement / If I pushed you to the edge?" he sings.

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Music Features

Taylor Swift Praises Bon Iver, Anaïs Mitchell, and Aaron Dessner's "The Latter Days"

Justin Vernon debuted the song as part of a GOTV initiative in his home state of Wisconsin.

Taylor Swift

Shutterstock, By Tinseltown

Taylor Swift just announced support for a new song by two of her folklore collaborators: The National's Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon.

The song, called "The Latter Days" is, first and foremost, a call to action. Written from the perspective of someone in the future, it asks the question: Have I done enough?


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Screenshot from 22 (OVER S∞∞N) / Bon Iver / YouTube.com

The first time I heard 22, A Million, I was walking through Central Park on my way to the hospital where I was working. It was a fall day in 2016 and the leaves were just beginning to change. Donald Trump had yet to be elected, and—as it usually goes with life-changing albums—I had no idea what this album would come to mean to me.

Like many listeners, I was initially thrown off by the song titles' weird punctuation and by the abstract sounds of tracks like 10 d E A T h b R E a s T. But somehow, over the next few months—as the American simulation began to glitch and shatter around me—22, A Million became a life force and then a sacred text.

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New Releases

Bon Iver Drops Anticapitalist Anthem Featuring Bruce Springsteen and Jenny Lewis

"Each and every person on earth deserves to live fully with dignity, equity, justice, and joy. Instead, our capitalistic societies have created a world that is most supportive of the wealthy and the elite, and the predatory corporations and policies that drive their disproportionate success."

Bon Iver

Bon Iver has shared a surprise new song entitled "AUATC."

Produced by Justin Vernon, Jim-E Stack, and BJ Burton, and featuring contributions from Jenny Lewis, Bruce Springsteen, Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, Phil Cook, and more, it's Bon Iver's second single of 2020.

The song dropped today along with a music video created by Aaron Anderson and Eric Timothy Carlson and starring Randall Riley. Filmed in New York, the video is mostly a montage of simple, beautiful footage of Riley dancing across bridges and through neighborhood scenes, all while wearing a mask. It's distinctly summer-in-the-time-of-COVID-core, from its DIY feel to its vaguely anticapitalist implications. (The video begins and ends with a few brightly colored cartoons depicting engorged, Monopoly Man-like men in suits all eating vast amounts of cake).

The song's acronymic title stands for "Ate Up All Their Cake," so its anticapitalist arguments aren't exactly covert.

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Music Features

What Is Cottagecore and What Does It Have to Do With Taylor Swift's 'folklore'?

Taylor Swift's "folklore" breaks down time, threading personal mythologies with nonlinear storytelling, embedding raw personal emotion into fictional stories.

Taylor Swift at the Toronto International Film Festival

Photo by Evan Agostini (Shutterstock)

After months of isolation, Taylor Swift released a surprise album, shifting the world on its axis.

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Rihanna

Photo by Image Press Agency-NurPhoto-Shutterstock

2010 was a major time for music.

The year brought landmark records for artists like Kanye West, Kesha, and Vampire Weekend—all of which we've previously discussed at length. But that's only the tip of the iceberg of records that, despite being released a decade ago, still feel timeless in their own ways.

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