It’s no accident that Taylor Swift is the queen of giving hints. Not in the slightest. Every Easter egg that she leaves in her music is deliberately planned out by the musician, including poetic allusions, numerological allusions, and yes, even manicures.
She has a long history of hiding secret hints in her work, that may hint to the Swifties about some future project or just a reference to something particular in her life. Here’s what ‘Easter Eggs’ really means along with a list of times when she truly aced the art of leaving traces for Swifties to follow, which later led to big surprises.
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What Exactly Are Taylor Swift’s Easter Eggs?
Taylor Swift isn’t the usual artist to just drop albums and music announcements. She makes cheeky allusions to her dedicated fans through the lyrics, liner notes, music video visuals, and clothing rather than directly addressing relationships or news stories. By doing this, Swift builds a community among her followers who put their heads together to speculate about what the 11-time Grammy winner will do next.
Since the introduction of social media, particularly TikTok, hypotheses have spread even more quickly than Swift’s own puzzling hints. In essence, being a Swift fan occasionally resembles a scavenger hunt with a dash of creative problem-solving. Everything she does, wear, posts, is carefully planned to reveal a series of clues that lets the fans know about some future project she’s working on. A true Mastermind, Taylor Swift twisted her fandom into a game of jigsaw puzzle!
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How Did The Easter Eggs Game Begin?
From ‘Fearless’ to ‘Red’ Swift frequently capitalized specific letters in the lyric notes to create a code. In ‘1989‘ she did the opposite; allowing fans to decipher messages using uncapitalized characters. Swift capitalized the letters that read “I CRIED WHILE RECORDING THIS” for the song ‘Fifteen‘ on the lyric sheet for ‘Fearless‘ for instance.
What started as something she did just for fun is now a huge part of the fandom. Fans spend days, weeks, and months decoding all her music, music videos, what outfits she wears, and even minute details like colors, accessories, or certain words in statements she makes.
What Does Taylor Swift Say About Easter Eggs?
Fans claim they take pleasure in solving the singer’s obscure messages and puns. As Swift’s career developed, she became a strategist and was able to establish a new identity for herself as a master of surprise and deceit in addition to being an outstanding songwriter. And the best part?
Swift is aware that her followers like deciphering her cryptic clues and messages. “I’ve trained them to be that way,” Swift stated in 2019 to Entertainment Weekly “I love that they like the cryptic hint-dropping. Because as long as they like it, I’ll keep doing it. It’s fun. It feels mischievous and playful.”
“It’s sort of a tradition that we started a very long time ago,” Swift stated to Jimmy Fallon about how Easter Eggs started. “I think the first time that I started dropping sort of cryptic clues in my music was when I was 14 or 15, putting together my first album.”
In 2021, she tweeted “Happy decoding!” with a video of letter pairings against a gold backrround. When the code was cracked, it represented six unheard songs that would appear on the reissue of her album ‘Fearless‘ Swift knows all about the fan theories and enjoys the tension she creates among her fans.
What Are Taylor’s Most Genius Easter Eggs?
The music video for her lead song, ‘Look What You Made Me Do,’ was packed full of Easter eggs once the ‘Reputation’ album got going. Scenes from the music video – the snakes – representing how everyone around the world labeled her as a snake during her canceled era; the one dollar bill during the bathtub scene; representing the one dollar bill she sued David Mueller for, the mountain of ‘old Taylors’, among many others. Swift explained that it was a chance for her to interact with her followers since she wasn’t giving interviews at the time.
“Literally the whole video is just an Easter egg,” she said to Entertainment Weekly. “There are thousands of Easter eggs. There are some that people still haven’t found. It will be decades before people find them all.”
The artist specifically informed fans that the music video for “Me!” would be filled of Easter eggs, some of which would “take a minute to reveal their meaning,” when the song was released in 2019. The two largest Easter eggs in the video were the titles of the new album (Lover) and the following song, “You Need To Calm Down,” which were both written momentarily in the backdrop of a scene.
In April 2020, Swift posted a selfie via Instagram with the message, “Not a lot going on at the moment,” which turned out to be one of her largest Easter eggs.
Fans did not view this as an Easter egg at the time because it occurred at the height of the pandemic. Of course, everything was made plain once the singer said she was releasing Folklore, her eighth studio album.
Naturally, Miss Swift found all the Folklore Easter eggs to be insufficient as she surprised the public by releasing her ninth studio album, ‘Evermore’, only four months later. And there were definitely enough Easter eggs included. Swift reused her previous Instagram caption, “Not a lot going on at the moment” in November 2020.
Additionally, she shared pictures from a photo shoot for Entertainment Weekly, captioning them“tis the damn season,” which is a song on the album. Swift honored her ninth album with nine tree emojis in a tweet the day before she made the album announcement.
The singer unveiled an anagram-filled video from “the vault,” which was a reference to all of her unreleased songs from the album, to start with the unveiling of ‘Fearless’ (Taylor’s Version). She wrote on social media, “The vault door is about to be as unhinged as you’ll think I am after you watch this video,” she said on social media. “Level Expert. Happy decoding!” She did the same during the release of RED (Taylor’s Version).
Every detail appears to be a hint because of the singer’s love of Easter eggs, and this is why Swifties’ brains went into a frenzy. Swift fans are currently attempting to predict which re-recording will come next. Then, just as Swifties were beginning to speculate that Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) might be the next release, Taylor unexpectedly revealed ‘Midnights’.
Easter Eggs In ‘Midnights‘ By Taylor Swift
At the 2022 MTV VMAs, the singer announced the release of her tenth studio album, ‘Midnights‘ instead of revealing the reissue of 1989 or ‘Reputation’ (Taylor’s Version) after winning the VMA for Best Direction.
Here are the hints that she has so far left. The singer’s fortunate number, 13, is highlighted by the album’s 13 tunes. Swift’s new music is exciting. And when the music video for her single ‘Anti-Hero’ was released, fans became even more ecstatic. Similar to every previous music video she’s made, Swift included some hidden messages that viewers were eager to decipher. She picks up a phone at the beginning of the video, symbolizing how the album is a voyage into her past. Swifties immediately made the connection between the scene and the lyric in Look What You Made Me Do MV. There she is seen picking up a phone and saying “I’m sorry, but the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now.”
She was seen strumming a guitar that curiously resembled the guitar from her Speak Now tour, and the Easter eggs kept coming. The lady who plays her daughter’s role in the MV wears a black dress from her Fearless tour.
The names Meredith, Olivia, and Benjamin, which also happen to be the names of her cats, were discovered in the will during the burial scene, raising even more doubts.
Whatever the case is, we enjoy these Easter Eggs and we look forward for more. Her signature Easter Eggs are just one of the many things that make her unique from other artists.
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