Taylor Swift is maybe more well-known for her love of Easter eggs than her romances these days, so of course, we trawled the new album to find every nod, wink or egg we could.
We’re bound to have missed some so get in touch if you recognise any after your first listen to the album…
I Forgot That You Existed:
Every lyric on this track is a barb aimed at anyone Taylor has ever feuded with – Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Justin Bieber, Demi Lovato…
It’s the first of several tracks where she name drops another celebrity and in I Forgot That You Existed it’s Drake, who in 2018 entered his own feud with Kim and Kanye.
Cruel Summer:
A companion to Reputation’s Getaway Car – ‘I’m drunk in the back of the car / and I cried like a baby coming home from the bar’ – Cruel Summer is clearly about her romance with Tom Hiddleston in 2016.
Lover:
Lover may be the song with the most obvious Easter eggs on a first listen.
The opening lines – ‘we could leave the Christmas lights up ’til January’ – appears to be a reference to not only the Christmas tree farm Taylor grew up on and the Christmas tree that appeared in the ME! video, which was not set at Christmas, but also to an old Instagram post Taylor shared in July 2018 when she returned to the farm.
‘Take me home,’ she captioned the snap of her recreating a pose from her childhood in Pennsylvania, and lo and behold, ‘take me home’ is the chorus to the new track.
In the second verse, Taylor sings: ‘We could let our friends crash in the living room.’
The pair are regularly pictured enjoying parties and nights out with pals in New York and London, and in December 2018 were pictured days after celebrating Christmas with Joe’s siblings.
Later, she sings: ‘I’ve loved you three summers now, honey, but I want ’em all.’
There’s some speculation over when Taylor and Joe began dating, although it is thought they met in the summer of 2016; in her cover of Earth Wind And Fire’s September she hinted at the date of their first date when she changed the lyrics to ‘do you remember the 28th night of September’.
If Taylor finished writing the song in 2018 – and the Christmas tree Instagram post suggests she did – she could be referencing the summers of 2016, 2017 and 2018.
‘And I’m highly suspicious / That everyone who sees you wants you,’ Taylor then goes on to sing and it’s not the first time she has sung about how jealous she gets over Joe.
In Gorgeous, from Reputation she sang: ‘If you’ve got a girlfriend, I’m jealous of her / But if you’re single that’s honestly worse’.
‘My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue / All’s well that ends well to end up with you / Swear to be overdramatic and true to my lover,’ it continues, and the phrase borrowed and blue are both two of the old wives tale of needing something new, something old, something borrowed and something blue on your wedding day.
These lyrics also hearken back to Dancing With Our Hands Tied from Reputation in which she sang that her heart had been ‘deep blue’ while the final line revealed links back to the heartbreaking track All Too Well from Red, in which she sang about remembering a love that had ended but being unable to let go.
The Man:
‘They’d say I played the field before I found someone to commit to / And that would be okay… I’d be a fearless leader, I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes you, What’s that like?… Let the players play, I’d be just like Leo in Saint Tropez.’
Yep, Leonardo DiCaprio gets a name drop in The Man, a song in which Taylor twists the narrative to consider her image in the media if she had made the same decisions and mistakes but was a man.
Her image in the media is a trope that Taylor is a fan of singing about (Blank Space, Look What You Made Me Do)
The Archer:
Track 5 songs are notorious for being the most emotionally vulnerable on a Taylor Swift album but unlike the other six, this one is thought to be about friends and not a lover.
And specifically Karlie Kloss.
The pair became pals in 2012 and were close friends for a long time, however, in recent years the two have not been spotted together with their lives taking different paths.
It was clear their friendship was over though when Karlie went on holiday with Scooter Braun.
The archer is the symbol for the zodiac sign Sagittarius, of which Taylor is, and she later sings: ‘All of my enemies started out friends, help me hold on to you.’
Katy Perry and Kim Kardashian are two of several who were pals for Taylor’s before they turned against her, so this line suggests she wants to hold on to Karlie.
I Think He Knows:
Kicking off with a lyric about 16th Avenue in Nashville – where Taylor and Joe were pictured in June 2017, one of the first times they were pictured together – I Think He Knows is an 80s-style BOP which is the second song on the album obviously about Joe Alwyn.
‘We could follow the sparks I’ll drive, lyrical smile, indigo eyes’
Sparks have been a recurring motif in Taylor’s work from the very beginning; she wrote Sparks Fly in 2006 although it wasn’t released until 2011 while shades of blue regularly appear in her lyrics.
Miss Americana And The Heartbreak Prince:
Honestly, send us your Easter egg discoveries for this one.
The song hearkens back to some of Taylor’s earlier tracks, with the high school romance setting, while she continues to sing about the colour blue, ‘we’re so sad we paint the town blue.’
Paper Rings:
Oh, this is 100% about Joe Alwyn.
Taylor sings about meeting him for the first time when his friends were ‘high’, stalking him on the internet (we all know Taylor is a big fan of stalking on the internet), and helping him to paint his brother’s room. In Dancing With Our Hands Tied Taylor sings ‘dark blue but you painted me golden’ – is Joe Alwyn’s brother’s bedroom gold?
Later she sings about jumping in icy outdoor pools – ‘when you jumped in first I went in too, I’m with you even if it makes me blue‘ – once again referencing her own motifs of the colour of love.
Cornelia Street:
Cornelia Street is a street in New York City where Taylor rented an apartment in mid-late 2016 while her TriBeCa apartment was being refurbished, and it is here that she and Joe first fell in love.
Singing again about alcohol and drinking beer on the roof of her apartment, Cornelia Street is a million times a companion song to King Of My Heart, only here she is much more blatant about the first few months of her romance with Joe.
Death By A Thousand Cuts:
A song about a failed romance, this could be about Tom Hiddleston, as she sings about a ‘paper cut sting from our paper-thin plans‘.
The pair infamously had a whirlwind romance that took them all over the globe but perhaps she’s admitting that they never looked past the now to consider the future.
That summer of their romance was also partly the subject of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, in which she sang ‘bass beat rattling the chandelier’.
Here instead she sings about boarding up the windows of a summer house with the ‘chandelier still flickering here‘.
‘Our songs, our film, united we stand, our country,‘ she half shouts half sings at one point – that’s got to be a clear reference to something, and some digging suggests it could be Tom because United We Stand is the name of an Avengers comic book.
It’s also a 2003 documentary about America’s reactions to 9/11 and the Iraq War – and you know they both have thoughts on that.
And it’s the name of a Facebook Group for Rangers FC, Tom’s favourite football team.
London Boy:
Where do we start?
London Boy opens with her Cats co-stars Idris Elba and James Corden speaking about riding around the city on a scooter before she launches into a play-by-play of all the things she loves about the city and her London Boy.
‘Now I love high tea, stories from uni and the West End… I enjoy nights out in Brixton, Shoreditch in the afternoon… So please show me, Hackney…’
(Taylor, if you’re keen to see more of South London, let me know…)
Later she sings about ‘fancying’ her London Boy, a call back to King Of My Heart in which she sings: ‘Say you fancy me, not fancy stuff.‘
Oh, and then she quotes the GC.
Yes, Taylor Swift sings the phrase: ‘Babes, don’t threaten me with a good time.’
Also – Don’t Threaten Me With A Good Time is a Panic! At The Disco song; Panic!’s Brendon Urie co-stars on later track ME!
Soon You’ll Get Better (feat. Dixie Chicks):
This may be one of the first open references Taylor makes to her faith, as she sings about ‘desperate people find faith so now I’ll pray to Jesus too‘.
The song is about the cancer diagnosis her mother Andrea has been battling, and she sings of waiting rooms, ‘holy orange bottles‘ and the idea that she cannot ever give up hope.
False God:
Since 1989’s opening track Welcome To New York, the city has been a second home for the singer where she spends the majority of her time.
In False God, she doubles down on her love of the city: ‘I can’t talk to you when you’re like this, staring out the window like I’m not your favourite town, I’m New York City.’
Later, she sings: ‘You’re the West Village, you still do it for me.’
The tone of the song feels like a past love but she famously fell in love with Joe Alwyn on Cornelia Street which is in the West Village, plus the idea of a lover from another country having his favourite town be in hers is classic Taylor.
You Need To Calm Down:
This song is about the haters – and Donald Trump.
‘But you’re takin’ shots at me like it’s Patrón and I’m just like, damn, it’s 7 am,’ she sings; Trump is famous for tweeting in the early hours of the morning and he’s sent several tweets over the years about Taylor.
‘And snakes and stones never broke my bones,‘ she adds later, an obvious reference to the snake imagery she reclaimed in 2017 after Kim Kardashian not-so-subtle-y called her one on social media.
Afterglow:
Taylor has often sung about islands and she references them again in Afterglow: ‘I lived like an island.’
Afterglow, similar to False God, plays with the idea of past love but with a hopeful lyric – ‘fighting with true love is boxing with no gloves‘ – which makes us think this is also about Joe.
ME! (feat. Brendon Urie of Panic! At The Disco):
‘I know that I get psycho on the phone…’ is more than likely a reference to the now iconic ‘I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, cause she’s dead!’ line in Look What You Made Me Do, as well as that rumoured phone call with ex-boyfriends such as Joe Jonas and of course that phone call with Kanye.
Interestingly, the album version of ME! doesn’t include the line ‘spelling is fun’.
It’s Nice To Have A Friend:
This song is clearly about best friend Abigal Lucier.
Set over three verses, which follow two friends from their school years playing video games and camping in tents, to being older and thinking about life, love and the universe, through to someone’s marriage but how they’ll always have each other’s backs.
Daylight:
Daylight in many ways closes out several motifs that have been running throughout Taylor’s work for 13 years, most notably colours.
‘I once believed love would be black and white but it’s golden… I once believed love would be burning red but it’s golden.’
The entire fourth album Red focused on this colour with the phrase ‘burning red’ a refrain in the title track, while in Out Of The Woods from fifth album 1989 she sings: ‘The rest of the world was black and white but we were in screaming colour.‘
On unreleased track I’d Lie she also sings about a boy who only ‘sees everything black and white‘, suggesting that now Taylor has a love that is unlike any she has had before.
‘I’ve been sleeping so long in a 20-year dark night,’ she adds, referencing earlier track Lover in which she sings: ‘Have I known you 20 seconds or 20 years?’
In another line, she sings: ‘Maybe you ran with the wolves and refused to settle down.’
In the Out Of The Woods music video, Taylor was chased by wolves, suggesting perhaps that her true love was coming up behind her all along.
Lover is out on 23 August.
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