It’s March 2020. The world is in lockdown. And Taylor Swift decides it’s the perfect time to shake things up. She sends a message to Aaron Dessner, of The National: “Hey, it’s Taylor. Would you ever be up for writing songs with me?”

Aaron had met Taylor before, but this seemed out of the blue.

Dessner, at the start of the pandemic, had found himself in an unexpected creative surge.

With tours on hold and the world on pause, he immersed himself in producing music from his home studio in Upstate New York, Long Pond Studios.

He was exploring fully produced songscapes that could have been for The National, Big Red Machine, or maybe something entirely new.

When Swift reached out, he was ready.

He put together a folder of tracks and sent them.

Just like that, a creative collaboration was born.

If you’re working on something good — something real — it’s easy to think that’s enough.

That your music will speak for itself. Your design. Your writing.

That someone will stumble across it, fall in love, and spread the word.

Maybe. But probably not.

As Austin Kleon writes in his book Show Your Work:

“You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you.

“But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable.”