Taylor Swift Announces Collaborators for Next Album Via Coded Puzzle

Taylor Swift has done it again. The Queen of Easter eggs has tweeted a video of a slew of nonsensical letters coming out of a vault to give fans clues about her upcoming rerecorded album, “Red (Taylor’s Version).”

Swift has always loved leaving her fans a trail of clues, but the vault videos first began back in April as part of the promotion for “Fearless (Taylor’s Version).” They’re a nod to her releasing never-before-heard songs, or “songs from the vault.”

The decoding difficulty of this latest vault video is, according to Swift, “casually cruel in the name of being honest”, a reference to the lyrics in her song “All Too Well.”

If you don’t have time to decode the puzzle yourself, here’s everything you need to know.

It’s a Crossword Puzzle

Don’t feel bad if you couldn’t make sense of the gibberish in the video. It looks hopeless at first. But, if you assemble the string of letters like a crossword puzzle, some words, and some names, start to stand out.

One of the words that pop out is “Ronan”, a single released by Swift in 2012 about a 4-year-old-boy named Ronan who died from Cancer. The single was not part of any Swift album, but this seems to confirm that Swift will be re-recording the song for “Red (Taylor’s Version).

The crossword puzzle in and of itself is a “Red” era Taylor Swift reference. “Fighting with him was like trying to solve a crossword and realizing there’s no right answer” is another “All Too Well” lyric.

Swift Announced Several Big Name Collaborators

Hiding in plain sight were the names of some titans of the music industry, including Ed Sheeran, Chris Stapleton, and Phoebe Bridgers.

Sheeran and Swift have collaborated in the past and are good friends. The British singer-songwriter appeared on the original version of “Red”, on the track “Everything Has Changed.” It’s good to know he’ll be back this time around.

Stapleton and Bridgers represent very different fan bases, but both have overlap with Swift fans. Stapleton is a country music artist and Bridgers is an Indie rock singer-songwriter.

Other Fan-Pleasers

Swift will also finally be releasing the full ten-minute version of “All Too Well” that Swifites have been craving for years. She hinted at this when she announced “Red (Taylor’s Version)” via Instagram, but it has now been confirmed by the crossword puzzle.

Swift will also be including the track “Better Man” on the album, a song she wrote for the Country group “Little Big Town” but which she herself has never recorded a version of.

Another song Swift wrote but hasn’t recorded, “Babe”, will also be on the album. Swift wrote the song for the country music duo “Sugarland.”

The words “Nothing New” are also in the crossword puzzle, the title of an unreleased song that Swift wrote during the “Red” era but that didn’t make it to the album.

Titles of the Vault Songs Revealed

The relevance of some of the words found in the crossword puzzle is not immediately clear, which means they are the titles of the never-before-heard songs.

The titles of the from-the-vault songs are “Message in a Bottle”, “I Bet You Think About Me”, “Forever Winter”, “Run”, and “The Very First Night.”

“Red (Taylor’s Version)”, which features a total of thirty songs, will be released on November 19, but if we know anything about Swift, there will undoubtedly be some treats and surprises (and singles!) well before then.

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