Taylor Swift Confirms She’s Releasing a New Original Song for <em>Toy Story 5</em>

THE RUNDOWN

• Taylor Swift started a countdown this afternoon teasing a 2 P.M. announcement tied to the Toy Story 5 film.
• The announcement turned out to be an original song for the upcoming movie titled “I Knew It, I Knew You.”
• Swift first sparked rumors she was involved with the Pixar film in late April.

Taylor Swift has been teasing a collaboration with Toy Story 5 for days, and at 2 P.M. today, the singer announced her mysterious new project tied to the Disney-Pixar film: She is dropping an original song titled “I Knew It, I Knew You” for the movie on Friday, June 5.

According to a press release from Walt Disney Studios, the track is written and produced by Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff and is inspired by the Toy Story character Jessie the cowgirl. The song “also marks a return to Taylor Swift’s country roots, blending styles that have defined her record-breaking career as a songwriter and artist,” per the release.

Swift also shared the news on Instagram with a photo of herself surrounded by flowers and a carousel of the single’s various cover art.

“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,” she wrote in the caption. “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?”

“It’s incredible just how meaningful it’s been having Taylor write and perform this song. Her connection to Jessie and the immediate way she understood what the character was going through was undeniable,” Toy Story 5 director and screenwriter Andrew Stanton said in a statement. “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.”

Much like she did during her The Life of a Showgirl rollout, Swift started a countdown on her site today to tease the news. Once the clock ran out, the webpage linked to Swift’s online store, where she is selling three types of CD singles for the track: There’s an original version, an acoustic version, and a piano version.

The background of the countdown showed a “TS” Toy Story billboard—the same one that has been spotted in various cities over the weekend.

The film’s character Jessie danced onscreen too, shortly after Pixar released an animation of her “making those moves up as she goes” to “Shake It Off” on top of a “TS” billboard.

The Pixar team initially played coy about Swift’s involvement, with Stanton shooting down rumors that Swift was doing the ending song of the film. After calling the rumors “a freakin’ honor” in an interview with USA Today, he added, “The sad truth is we watched the movie being mixed last week and the song on the end was not Taylor Swift.”

Swift first sparked rumors she’d be collaborating on the Disney-Pixar film on April 30, when a countdown briefly appeared on her site featuring Toy Story clouds.

Over the weekend, “TS” billboards appeared with 13 clouds on them, and fans noticed that her 1989 (Taylor’s Version) cover art had clouds instead of birds on Apple Music and YouTube Music.

Taylor Swift’s 1989 (Taylor’s Version) cover art on YouTube Music.

Swift also wore an outfit with Toy Story colors on April 27 while out in New York City, her first possible Easter egg alluding to the project:

The full tracklist of the Toy Story 5 soundtrack hasn’t been announced yet; the film comes out on June 19.

While Swift has made more public appearances lately, she has kept her next music project private. Some fans speculated that she could be teasing her 13th album through her outfits.

Swift herself gave a rare interview in late April in which she discussed songwriting with The New York Times. She spoke about shifting to write about fictional characters, saying, “I can only speak to me but as I’ve grown up, the intensity of the sort of no-pun-intended ‘message in a bottle’ nature of my songwriting has shifted and changed into something else. It used to be like, ‘I can’t tell a person how I feel so I’ll write it in this song.’ And that was really important for me at the time that it was important for me. It’s also important when you’re in your early 20s, and there’s someone you shouldn’t talk to and you don’t want to call them because they’re bad for you and it’s toxic. So you just—you write it in the song, and that’s where it lives, like almost as a method of self-control or self-preservation or something. But for the Folklore album and everything like that…it wasn’t as a response to having a public life and the intrusions that come with that. It was really more of just wanting to challenge myself a writer.”