8 hours ago
12
Taylor Swift does not fear a challenge. She’s broken records then broken those records; taken Grammy snubs as a sign she just has to work harder; mounted probably the most physically exhausting tour of all time. But in writing a song for Toy Story’s cowgirl Jessie, she’s set herself a deranged task: how could anyone outdo Randy Newman’s devastating When She Loved Me, Jessie’s song about being abandoned by her owner, Emily, from Toy Story 2?
Newman’s songs for the Disney Pixar series are some of the greatest film soundtrack work of all time, and Swift knows it. In a post about her song, she acknowledged the “incomparable” Newman: “You created the Toy Story musical world, and we are lucky to get to live in it.” Her own ventures into soundtrack work have never had much staying power (beyond Zayn collab I Don’t Wanna Live Forever from Fifty Shades Darker).
Thank God, she doesn’t try to. I Knew It, I Knew You feels like an answer song to When She Loved Me as Jessie and Emily are (presumably) reunited. It’s not a ballad but a moment of gentle elation as the once-favourite toy recognises everything about her former owner years later – her smile, the sound of her bare footsteps.
Firmly in Swift’s nostalgic wheelhouse, it has some of her loveliest (and tightest) songwriting in quite some time: toys are “parachutes for the free fall of being younger”; Jessie knew “all your blues like a mood ring changing colours”. Last month, Swift talked to the New York Times about the granular technicalities of how she sets words and sounds against each other. Her singing here is so lovely and intentional; the soft, staccato insistence of these lines trembles with a trace of anxiety at how precarious even that deep love can be.
Never mind the plot of Toy Story 5 – this is a Taylor Swift song and so the potential subtext is manifold. Fans have often speculated about whether Swift will return to her country origins, and the message and rootsy soul of I Knew It, I Knew You also feels like her acknowledging the long intimacy they share. There are new melodic gestures for her – the classic rising chords of “life has ways of leaving those days behind” – but also gorgeous Swiftian moments, like the tentative whisper in “all you said was: ‘Hi…’”
In Toy Story 5, the toys are facing obsolescence at the hands of tablets and AI playthings. The organic instrumentation of I Knew It, I Knew You – down to that beautiful room sound on the drums – resounds with handcrafted care, the opposite of AI slop. (After rumours their working relationship had faltered, Jack Antonoff is back on production; the sax at the end has his unfortunate telltale blare.)
But maybe there’s also some anxiety to the country gesture, too. Swift’s latest album, last year’s The Life of a Showgirl, was her worst-received record, with its depthless and self-serving lyrics. The whole picture of I Knew It, I Knew You can’t help but come off like a reminder of what fans love about Swift. “My boy only breaks his favourite toys,” she sang on 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department of being discarded by an ex: it’s not just Woody and co that fear being tossed aside. And maybe the way she brings Jessie’s emotional world to life underscores that Swift is no longer her best songwriting subject. On Folklore, she started writing more fictional narratives, where it turned out she thrived, a pivot that changes the terms of engagement for fans primed for personal disclosures in her writing.
Either way, the circularity of it all is almost unbearably poignant. When the song was announced, Swift said she had loved the Toy Story series since the first one came out when she was five years old. She’s now 36; many fans who have grown up alongside Swift will be watching this film with their own five-year-olds. Pixar movies – and Newman’s songs – have always been designed to emotionally annihilate adults while their kids laugh at the spork with a funny face. Any Swiftie parent listening to I Knew It, I Knew You at the cinema later this month can use their own tears to salt their popcorn. Really is quite pretty to think about that invisible string tying us all together.
