Not only will Taylor Swift be acting and singing in the upcoming movie musical based on Broadway mega-hit Cats, it’s just been revealed that she’s also teamed up with Cats composer Andrew Lloyd Webber to write a new song specifically for the project.
As Variety reports, the new track is titled “Beautiful Ghosts”, and has been kept under wraps for almost a year.
According to Variety, Swift won’t be performing “Beautiful Ghosts”; rather, the new song “will be sung in a narrative moment in the film by English ballerina Francesca Hayward, who plays Victoria.” However, Swift will perform her own version of the new song for the film’s end credits.
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“Beautiful Ghosts” was reportedly written by Swift and Lloyd Webber during filming of the “Cats” movie in late 2018, with the song “coming together spontaneously” as she rehearsed with Webber to prepare for a song she sings in the film, “Macavity the Mystery Cat”.
The song came to be after director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”, “Les Miserables”) and writer Lee Hall made the decision to beef up the role of “white cat” Victoria, who does not have a musical number in the original. With Victoria’s role now expanded, Lloyd Webber was tasked with working on the music for a new song that would suit the character. Swift offered to write the lyrics, which led to her contributing to the music as well (the two will share credit).
“When I first read the screenplay, the first thing I said was, ‘We have to have a song for Victoria,’” Lloyd Webber says of the song, which he describes as “an incredibly important and central part of the whole film.”
For Hooper, the song exceeded all expectations. “What I couldn’t believe was the extraordinary beauty of these lyrics that Taylor had written,” he says. “It was as if someone had come into the film I was in the middle of making and… had reflected back to me a profound understanding of what we are trying to do with the movie. It was utterly thrilling.”
In addition to Swift, other members of the “Cats” cast include Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Idris Elba, James Corden, Rebel Wilson, Jason Derulo and Jennifer Hudson, who’ll wrap her powerful pipes around the show’s signature song “Memory”.
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A release date for “Cats” has yet to be announced, but a sneak-peek trailer was released earlier this year.