The opening track off Taylor Swift's forthcoming album, 1989, hit iTunes on Monday.
"Welcome to New York" comes on the heels of "Shake It Off" and "Out of the Woods," singles that were meant to solidify the 24-year-old singer's transformation from country songstress to pop idol.
"This album is a rebirth for me," Swift said when she announced 1989 two months ago. "This is my very first documented, official pop album."
In that vein, "Welcome to New York," which was produced and co-written by OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder, follows Swift's journey from small-town country star to New Yorker.
"Walking through a crowd/The village is aglow," she sings on the track. "Everybody here wanted something more for a sound we hadn't heard before."
In a video accompanying the release of the new single, Swift described the Big Apple as an "important landscape and location for the story of my life for the last couple of years."
"The inspiration that I found in that city is kind of hard to describe and hard to compare to any other force of inspiration I've ever experienced in my life," she said. "It's like an electric city and I approached moving there with such wide-eyed optimism and sort of saw it as a place of endless potential and possibilities."
Source: UPI