On 2020’s folklore: long pond studio sessions, Swift explained:

I think “the lakes” sort of sounds like a testament of what I’ve wanted to escape from and where I saw myself escaping. We’d gone to the Lake District in England a couple years ago — In the 19th century, you had a lot of poets, like William Wordsworth and John Keats would spend a lot of time there. There was a poet district, these artists moved there were kind of heckled for it and made fun of for it as being these eccentrics and these kind of odd artists who decided that they just wanted to live there. I remember when we went, I thought, “Man, I could see this. You live in a cottage and you’ve got wisteria growing up the outside of it. Of course they escaped like that, of course they would do that.” And they had their own community of other artists who had done the same thing. In my career, since I was probably about 20, written about this sort of cottage backup plan that I have. “the lakes” is really talking a lot about relating to people who, hundreds of years ago, had the same exit plan and did it. I went to William Wordsworth’s grave, just sat there and I was like, “Wow, you went and did it, you just did it. You just went away and you kept writing, but you didn’t subscribe to the things that were killing you.” And that’s really the overarching thing that I felt when I was writing folklore is, I may not be able to go to the Lakes right now, or to go anywhere, but I’m going there in my head, and this escape plan is working. I thought [this song] would be the perfect way to slot the last puzzle piece in, right when people least expected it. Because “hoax” as the ending song for the record, I thought was interesting for a couple weeks, but then I wanted to actually come in with the real last song of the record, which is “the lakes”, that’s kind of the overarching theme of the whole album, of trying to escape, having something you wanna protect, trying to protect your own sanity, and saying, “Look, they did this hundreds of years ago. I’m not the first person who’s felt this way, they did this.”

Antonoff told Billboard in July 2021:

On one of my favorite songs on folklore, ‘The Lakes,’ there was this big orchestral version, and Taylor was like, ‘Eh, make it small.’ I had gotten lost in the string arrangements and all this stuff, and I took everything out. I was just like, ‘Oh, my God!’ We were not together because that record was made [remotely], but I remember being in the studio alone like, ‘Holy shit, this is so perfect.’

Aaron Dessner, when asked about the song in an interview with Vulture, revealed that it was a song Jack Antonoff produced with Swift.

“That’s a Jack song. It’s a beautiful kind of garden, or like you’re lost in a beautiful garden. There’s a kind of Greek poetry to it. Tragic poetry, I guess.”