Songfacts®:

• In 2013, Taylor Swift purchased a waterfront mansion dubbed "Holiday House" in the affluent Rhode Island village of Watch Hill for around $17 million. Here, she sings about one of the previous owners of the property, the eccentric heiress Rebekah Harkness.
• Born in St. Louis, Rebekah married Standard Oil heir William Harkness in October 1947. Swift recounts their nuptials in the first verse.
  
  Bill was the heir to the Standard Oil name and money
  And the town said, "How did a middle-class divorcée do?it?"
  The wedding was charming, if a little gauche
  There's only so far new money goes
  
  The newly married couple moved into "Holiday House," but after suffering two heart attacks William Harkness died in 1954 leaving Rebekah an exorbitantly wealthy widow.
• Swift recounts how the shameless eccentric Rebekah Harkness was known for cleaning her pool with Dom Pérignon and stealing her neighbor's dog amid a feud, dying it lime green. She concludes on the chorus:
  
  There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen
  She had a marvelous time ruining everything
  
  The track becomes personal towards the end when it flips and Swift enters saying she bought the home. The songstress then changes the pronouns to demonstrate how much Harkness' story resonates with her. Like the heiress, Swift has received harsh criticism from the media but carried on forging her own path. Both had "a marvelous time" doing so.
• Recorded for Taylor Swift's Folklore album, the record represents a rare excursion outside of the songstress' usual first-person usage. Most of the songs are third person fictional narratives, but this is one of the few occasions when Swift has sung about an actual person. Its closest cousin is probably her Red track "The Lucky One," which is rumored to be about Joni Mitchell.
• Taylor Swift wrote the song with its producer, Aaron Dessner. The National multi-instrumentalist collaborated with her on 11 out of the 16 Folklore tracks.
• Taylor Swift was originally told about Rebekah Harkness by the real estate agent who was walking her through "Holiday House." She explained to Entertainment Weekly: "As soon as I found out about her, I wanted to know everything I could. So I started reading. I found her so interesting. And then as more parallels began to develop between our two lives - being the lady that lives in that house on the hill that everybody gets to gossip about - I was always looking for an opportunity to write about her. And I finally found it."