“Beautiful Ghosts,” the song that Taylor Swift put words to for Tom Hooper’s upcoming Cats movie, has arrived – and guess what? Swift might be Cats creator and famed Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ideal lyricist.
Lloyd Webber is the man who brought the world Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and one of the most recorded songs in theatre history, “Memory” from Cats. He is notorious for writing musicals with beautiful music and weak lyrics. But “Beautiful Ghosts” makes a compelling argument that what every ALW musical needs is a shrewd lyricist who was once a teenage girl – and who, consequently, is not embarrassed to embrace the gushy romantic heart of his music. Here are five reasons “Beautiful Ghosts” is worth a second listen, or several.
1) It adds to our understanding of Victoria, the White Cat. “Beautiful Ghosts” isn’t a showy end-credits pop song; it’s a new song inserted into the plot of the show.
It will follow “Memory” in the upcoming film. The cat who sings it, Victoria
has a bigger role: Now, the entire story is framed through her point of view, and Victoria is a younger mirror of Grizabella.
In “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria echoes “Memory” and reflects on Grizabella’s tragic life, as well as her own. “Memory” keeps calling for “new life,” while through “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria transitions from “Memory’s” sadness to a joy that’s all her own – through the realization that she loves the life she has. Where “Memory” is fuzzy, with vague hints of former happiness, “Beautiful Ghosts” weaves a mini-narrative of Victoria’s life: cast onto the streets, apparently by cruel former owners, she distrusts other cats, but eventually befriends them and comes to love her life. With this one song, she goes from being opaque and silent to having depth, complexity, and a backstory that doesn’t involve her being a sex object.
2) It helps us understand “Memory.” Even though “Beautiful Ghosts” is sung by Victoria to Grizabella, it also gives us crucial insight into Grizabella’s life. When Victoria sings lines like, “Should I take chances when no one took chances on me?” she’s simultaneously referencing her own life and Grizabella’s: Grizabella at least knew a time when she was loved and admired, and had human companionship to look back on. Victoria has only known rejection.
Taylor Swift has clearly asked herself, “How can I bring more coherence to “Memory,” a weird-ass song about a cat who is also a sex worker who is also dying and friendless and stuck with her memories of having once been very hot?” The solution, which she provides in “Beautiful Ghosts,” is to give Grizabella slightly more of a past.
In a recent radio interview, Swift described her approach to creating the song – which involved contrasting Victoria’s life with Grizabella’s: ‘Memory’ is Grizabella singing about how she had all these beautiful, incredible moments in her past. She had these glittering occasions and she felt beautiful and she felt wanted and now she doesn’t feel that way anymore.’ This is fanfic on Swift’s part. While this glittering history can be implied, it’s not literally in the lyrics to “Memory,“ or anywhere else in Cats – the most concrete detail “Memory” offers is that Grizabella once enjoyed “days in the sun.” It’s a huge bonus to see Grizabella given a more concrete backstory that has nothing to do with her, uh, hanging out in brothels.
“Beautiful Ghosts” explains that Grizabella was “born into nothing” but now has memories of “dazzling rooms” and a time she was not just beautiful, but loved. In essence, Swift has not only crafted a satisfying character song for Victoria – she’s deepened Grizabella and “Memory” too.
3) It’s clearly a song that could be sung by a cat.
This is hard! “Memory” couldn’t manage it and from the first line of “Beautiful Ghosts,” the song feels like one that could be sung by a cat – one who has wandered the streets, hearing the voices of its fellow cats in the dark. Victoria sings of the “wild ones” who “tame the fear” within her as she longs to “get let into” the rooms inhabited by the humans she once knew and yearned for love from. These are bittersweet lyrics, but more importantly, they’re lyrics that pretty clearly describe the life of a cat.
The extent to which Swift has thought about how cats feel becomes increasingly apparent when you realize that “Beautiful Ghosts” is a hymn to found family and the alley cat existence, the freedom of a life lived on the streets, and the beauty of, well, a gang of stray cats. (This may also sound like a metaphor for marginalized communities finding strength in each other after being turned out of their homes.)
4) It hints at what a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could be like with a smart lyricist who embraces his romanticism. The typical trade-off with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals is that his lush, lofty melodic lines take priority over lyrics. The general wisdom among musical theater fans is that ALW was only truly great when he was composing with his earliest collaborator, the brilliant lyricist Tim Rice. The ALW/Rice shows (Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita) are fantastic – witty, satirical, and incisive, ranging from complex political themes to rollicking whimsy and charming pastiche.
ALW’s later shows’ scores were often gorgeous, full of beautiful melodies. But the plots were often too soapy, and he bounced around between lyricists who frequently paired his music with asininewords.
When ALW was working with someone equally as or more talented than he was, he managed to create popular, lasting shows, including Cats and Phantom of the Opera. But ALW didn’t always work with equals who could rein him in. And so he only kept getting more extravagant in his desire to combine deeply emotional musical motifs with schmoopy, overblown storylines. In other words, post-Rice, ALW has always been hampered by his own self-indulgence and the lack of a lyricist as good at writing lyrics as ALW is at writing music.
That’s why a Taylor Swift-ALW collaboration is genuinely exciting. In the annals of ALW collaborators, Swift may be the first lyricist with the range, experience, and stature to stand alongside Rice. But more importantly, she clearly loves Cats, loves the music, and loves actual cats. In that interview quoted above, for example, she discussed Victoria’s cat psychology at length. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which Tim Rice would say, as Swift did in that interview, “I got you. I know what that cat would say.”
And that may be what so many previous ALW musicals have lacked: the enthusiasm of a smart, savvy songwriter who’s also not afraid to unironically love and embrace her subject matter. Taylor Swift isn’t just a brilliant songwriter who credits the lyrics of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz for teaching her to write music with sharp edges and blatant emotive power. She’s also a fangirl. And fangirls know how to deliver deep, smart character studies while amplifying the emotional core of the stories they love. That combination of shrewd songwriting and passion is what propels the final verse of “Beautiful Ghosts” into something truly great.
5) “Beautiful Ghosts” has a surprise twist ending. Taylor Swift learned a lot from brilliant country songwriters, and one of the common country song traits she likes to carry forward is the “twist.” That’s when the final stanza upends the original meaning of the song and shifts the refrain into something new, surprising, and even richer. Throughout “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria has emphasized the fact that Grizabella still has her memories: “at least you have beautiful ghosts,” she sings, and the ghosts are the memories of Grizabella’s life of being beautiful and adored.
By contrast, Victoria herself has always lived on the streets, eventually taken in by the stray cats she eventually began to see as family. Initially, she describes the strays as voices she can only hear in the dark, while she wanders the streets, “alone and haunted.” Later, they become “phantoms of night,” as they lure her into her new exciting life. Finally, when Victoria has her epiphany that she’s happy with her friends, and she loves her alleycat life, she shifts from singing enviously to Grizabella about the “beautiful ghosts” of her memories. Instead, she sings, “So I’ll dance with these beautiful ghosts.”
The ghosts at the end of the song are the cats! Victoria’s ghosts are flesh and blood, and also have you ever met a cat, cats are clearly ghosts, with their silent paws and their eerie glow-eyes, and their ability to vanish into thin air. (Holy shit, the ghosts are the cats!) Only Taylor Swift could turn a metaphor about lost memories into a literal description of cats that is also a metaphor for found families and friendship. Don’t argue with me, this is perfect.
