Listen: Taylor Swift's 'Hunger Games' Ballad 'Safe and Sound'

Taylor Swift arrives at Billboard's Sixth Annual Women in Music event in New York.

Ray Tamarra/Getty Images

Taylor Swift gave her fans an early Christmas present last night by tweeting a link to "Safe and Sound," a new song she recorded for the Hunger Games soundtrack with folk duo the Civil Wars. The song, a dark ballad featuring harmony vocals from Joy Williams and John Paul White, features lyrics that touch on the story's themes of struggle and survival and is available exclusively on iTunes.

The Hunger Games soundtrack, which is due out on March 23rd, is the result of the first-ever collaboration between producer T-Bone Burnett and composer Danny Elfman, two of the biggest names in contemporary film music.

You can listen to Taylor Swift and the Civil Wars' song "Safe and Sound" below.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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