“Tay Story” Is Real: Taylor Swift Announces a New Original Song for ‘Toy Story 5’

There’s a snake in my boot, because Taylor Swift is officially a part of Disney’s Toy Story 5. On Wednesday, Swift officially announced “I Knew It, I Knew You”, a new original song that will be featured on the soundtrack for the film. The song will be officially released on Friday, June 5th, just a few weeks before the film officially debuts in theaters on June 19th. Limited-edition CDs of the song, as well as acoustic and piano variations of it, are currently available (while supplies last) on her website until Wednesday at 1pm CT.

“I’ve always dreamed of getting to write for these characters who I’ve adored since I was a 5 year old kid watching the first Toy Story movie,” Swift’s post announcing the news reads. “I fell instantly in love with Toy Story 5 when I was lucky enough to see it in its early stages, and I wrote this song as soon as I got home from the screening. Sometimes you just know, right?”

The clues pointing to this collab first arrived a little over a month ago, when a mysterious countdown with the franchise’s cloud wallpaper in the background surfaced on Swift’s website… and then disappeared. (As fans have joked plenty of times in the weeks since, it’s likely that some unlucky web developer accidentally entered a wrong date or sent the countdown live way too early.) Suddenly, fans began to find Easter eggs in Swift’s other public appearances from this year: the aesthetic of her self-directed “Opalite” music video, outfits she wore that matched the films’ color palette, and multiple bits from her New York Times profile as part of their 30 Greatest Songwriters initiative. In particular, she used cloud imagery, and described a hypothetical song that certainly sounds appropriate for Toy Story 5‘s plot.

“A hypothetical structure would be: first verse, a little girl learns a lesson that, in the chorus, her mom teaches her about,” Swift said at the time. “Then the little girl grows up, and now she’s a teenager, and she realizes: “Oh my god, my mom was right about this.” Now, the second time you hear the hook, that same hook means something a little bit different, because she’s grown up in her life. Then the bridge, maybe she goes on in her life. She has a little girl. She imparts that wisdom to her. And then, if you really want to get me to cry, bring back that same first line of the song and end the song with it.”

But once the countdown vanished, it seemed like a mystery that would remain unanswered, on par with the “five holes in the fence” and why Swift didn’t wear certain outfit combinations during the Eras Tour. The crew behind Toy Story 5 even seemed to debunk it all last week, with the film’s director, Andrew Stanton, telling YouTuber Khoslaa Wednesday that: “I had never seen it before, and it surprised us. We would be freaking honored. The sad truth is we watched the movie being mixed last week, and the song at the end of that was not Taylor Swift’s song.” But people pointed out Stanton’s very intentional wording in that answer… and that Swift could definitely still be involved with the movie without performing its end credits song.

She’s a Mastermind…

Pretty soon after, the dominos began to cascade in a line, when various “TS” billboards with exactly thirteen Toy Story clouds began to appear around the world. Pixar’s official social media account then tweeted a clip of an animated Jessie dancing in front of one of the billboards with the caption “she’s making those moves up as she goes!”, a clear reference to Swift’s song “Shake It Off” from her fifth album, 1989.

The clouds soon appeared elsewhere: alongside Swift’s other eras on Instagram’s stickers, and even replacing the seagulls that are on the cover art for 1989: Taylor’s Version. Swift’s fiance, Travis Kelce, also referenced Toy Story multiple times during that week’s episode of his New Heights podcast. And the most niche Easter egg could soon be found in the lyrics of Swift’s songs: if fans looked at the lyrics for any of her “Track 5″s (which already have a reputation for being especially emotional songs), they would find every random “T” and “S” now written in capital letters.

Finally, a new countdown launched on Swift’s website on Monday (National Cloud Day, no less) to hype up the CD release, which showed animations of Jessie running around a field. That whole aesthetic has led fans to wonder about the song itself: will it accompany the sequence of Jessie returning home to her original owner, Emily? Given how devastating Sarah McLachlan’s song “When She Loved Me” was during the original Jessie and Emily sequence in Toy Story 2, the possibility of Swift delivering her take on that emotional beat could be generational.

“It’s incredible just how meaningful it’s been having Taylor write and perform this song,” Stanton said in a statement when the song was announced. “Her connection to Jessie and the immediate way she understood what the character was going through was undeniable. The song is so deeply connected to ‘Toy Story.’ So much so that on first listen, it instantly felt like it had always belonged there, like a long-lost family member. It was kismet.”

It also could, theoretically, help get her closer to an EGOT. Swift has contributed to her fair share of soundtracks before, for films like The Hunger Games, Cats, Fifty Shades Darker, and Where The Crawdads Sing. But every previous Toy Story film has earned an Oscar nomination or win for Best Original Song, so there is a good chance that Swift could continue the trend. I’m already looking forward to the hypothetical live performance at the 2027 Oscars.

Toy Story 5 will be released exclusively in theaters on Friday, June 19th.

(featured image: Aeon/GC Images, Disney/Pixar)

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