When the pandemic stopped work for most people, Taylor Swift began crafting a quiet, cabin-in-the-woods folk album with The National’s Aaron Dessner. She surprised the world with the elegant Folklore in 2020, an album reflecting the isolation of both the project and the time.
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The fruitful sessions were so stimulating that Swift and Dessner kept going and followed five months later with Evermore.
For “Coney Island,” Dessner brought his entire band along. The members of The National are from Cincinnati, but the band formed in Brooklyn, New York.
Swift’s reference to Coney Island brought the group home, prompting singer Matt Berninger to post to his Instagram account that the experience “made me miss Brooklyn.” He also said singing with Swift “is like dancing with Gene Kelly. She made me look good and didn’t drop me once.”
On “Coney Island,” Swift and The National are musically and lyrically exposed in a minimalist production like the wounds of separation.
About the Song
“Coney Island” uses the famous New York destination for a relationship’s ending scene. Berninger joins Swift in a two-way conversation where both partners admit to neglecting the other.
Break my soul in two
Looking for you, but you’re right here
If I can’t relate to you anymore
Then, who am I related to?
And if this is the long haul
How’d we get here so soon?
Did I close my fist around something delicate?
Did I shatter you?
During Berninger’s verse, he talks about the empty feeling of losing himself in the relationship, and self-absorption caused him to abandon his partner.
The question pounds my head
“What’s a lifetime of achievement?”
If I pushed you to the edge
But you were too polite to leave me
Aaron and Bryce Dessner produced and co-wrote (with Swift) “Coney Island.” Aaron’s placid acoustic guitar signals the relationship’s fragility while his brother Bryce arranges wintry strings, bonding the visual to a cold, empty amusement park.
Swift’s then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, working under the pseudonym William Bowery, is also listed as a co-writer.
Working with The National
Swift explained to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe why she chose to work with The National: “I’m a huge fan of The National. I love the way they do that downbeat, sometimes self-loathing, reflective, just cut right to the heart of the matter.”
She explained further why she wanted Berninger to sing on “Coney Island”: “That lyricism it’s why I’m such a fan of the band, and when we had an idea that Matt could sound really amazing on this, that was the perspective I was coming from, was a male perspective of regret or guilt after a lifetime of a pattern of behavior.”
And I’m sitting on a bench in Coney Island wondering, where did my baby go?
The fast times, the bright lights, the merry-go
Sorry for not making you my centerfold
The Mall Before the Internet
Using Coney Island as the setting, Swift evokes warm nostalgia and places sadness in a once popular American place of entertainment, like a mall. Said Swift: “It was the place to be, and I was trying to reflect on the Coney Island visual of a place where thrills were once sought, a place where once it was all electricity and magic, and now the lights are out, and you’re looking at it thinking, ‘What did I do?’”
The New York Post once described Coney Island as “a crime-filled, run-down ghost of its glorious heyday.” People understand Coney Island as a cultural reference, but Swift’s mall allusion is a more localized representation of bleakness.
Most towns have either an empty mall with commercial real estate signs posted or a mall still holding on, begging someone to put it out of business.
Conclusion
After Folklore’s release, Swift and Dessner continued their collaboration. But the next batch of songs took shape without boundaries. During a period of experimentation, and due to Folklore’s critical acclaim and commercial success, Swift kept writing.
She told Variety that Evermore feels more like a “quiet conclusion.” She and Dessner had continued writing the day after Folklore’s release, and both musicians knew they weren’t finished.
The two sister albums fit neatly as companion pieces for Swift’s bittersweet songwriting. Evermore closes a chapter on this part of Swift’s creative life just as “Coney Island” represents the end of a once romantic relationship between the song’s characters.
The amusement park rides rust as the remaining light bulbs flicker until, eventually, like two former lovers, they all burn out.
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Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
