Quiet Before the Arena

Taylor Swift recorded Safe & Sound with The Civil Wars for The Hunger Games soundtrack and it’s the most interesting thing she’d done up to that point—a stark, fingerpicked lullaby that sounds nothing like anything else in her catalog. Joy Williams and John Paul White pull her toward their register, something fragile and slightly mournful, and she meets them there. The song doesn’t announce itself. It just settles in and refuses to leave, which is a different kind of power than anything on Speak Now.