Skip to main content
Taylor Swift It's Nice to Have a Friend
Taylor Swift | (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for ABA)

Taylor Swift’s new album, Lover, dropped Aug. 23, 2019. The album is longer than Swift’s previous work and features 18 songs. One of the songs is titled “It’s Nice to Have a Friend.” If fans listen closely, a special connection can be heard in the background of the song.

‘It’s Nice to Have a Friend’ is the shortest song on Taylor Swift’s album

“It’s Nice to Have a Friend” is the second to last track on the album. Swift, Louis Bells, and Adam Feeney wrote the song. Swift, Bells, and Frank Dukes produced the song. The song is the shortest song on the album, but fans and critics enjoy the song even though it’s brief.

“‘It’s Nice to Have a Friend’ is the most captivating song on Lover. It’s the rare Swift song that suggests more than it implies, that punctuates with commas and ellipses rather than exclamation marks and hard periods, and its delicate, crystalline beauty is unlike anything we’ve heard from Swift before,” wrote Andrew Unterberger for Billboard.

“It’s Nice To Have A Friend is one of the most unique songs off of the album Stop paying it to dust Its one of those songs that reminds me of middle school and can be a soundtrack on a becoming-of-age film,” wrote a fan on Twitter.

The song samples a youth choir from Toronto

If fans listen to “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” closely, instruments and a youth choir can be heard in the background. The song samples The Regent Park School of Music from Toronto. According to Dukes, the sample on “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” helps the kids in the program.

“We made it so that the proceeds from the sales of the library go to fund the school,” Dukes said. “Beyond that, when it gets sampled, money from sample clearances and the royalties — which could be long-standing and pretty significant overtime — would go and sustain the program.” 

The original sample of the choir can be found at the Dukes’ Kingsway Music Library and is called “Summer in the South.”

Taylor Swift confirmed the sample on ‘It’s Nice to Have a Friend’ helps the program

Swift is very active on social media. Oftentimes, she likes and reblogs posts on Tumblr as a way of answering fans’ questions without doing official interviews. On Tumblr, she liked a post confirming that streaming “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” helps fund the music education program in Toronto.

Even though it only released on Aug. 23, Lover had the biggest album sales week of 2019 in the United States. Swift will perform one of her new songs at the MTV VMA’s on Aug. 26. Fans do not know which song Swift selected. Swift is nominated for 10 different awards at the VMA’s including Song of the Year and Video of the Year.

Best in Entertainment