Yahoo Finance Swifties Everywhere Will Thank You If You Can Fully Decode This Taylor Swift Puzzle
Taylor Swift spent the pandemic lockdown producing multiple chart-topping albums, but she knows the rest of us spent a lot of our time doing puzzles, which proved to be a fairly useless hobby ... until now.
Waking up Thursday morning happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time ― well, at least happy and confused ― fans of the singer were treated to a cryptic video teasing songs that will be on the new version of her album “Red,” which originally came out in 2012.
“Level: casually cruel in the name of being honest,” Swift wrote alongside the video, referencing a lyric from Jake Gyllenhaal’s least favorite song, “All Too Well.”
The video — which she said made her cackle “maniacally” — shows a series of jumbled words shooting out of a vault, all cast in a deep red.
Swift pulled a similar, albeit slightly less intricate, stunt ahead of the release of her new version of “Fearless,” which came out in April. She is currently in the process of re-recording her first six albums, which are owned by her former record label Big Machine — an endeavor she is undertaking to regain control of her entire discography.
*presses post*
*cackles maniacally*
Level: casually cruel in the name of being honest pic.twitter.com/Tf0ahCMql8— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) August 5, 2021
It didn’t take fans too long to start decoding the message in the video, which turned out to be an Easter Egg-filled word-search puzzle.
Soon enough, eagle-eyed Swifties spotted “Phoebe Bridgers,” “Sheeran” and “Chris Stapleton,” signaling that the “Kyoto” singer, Swift’s frequent collaborator Ed Sheeran, and the Grammy-winning country star would appear on the album.
Hidden within the puzzle were also teases like “All Too Well Ten Minute Version,” “Babe,” “Ronan” and “Better Man,” which refer to a handful of bonus tracks that fans had already deduced would be included on the upcoming record.
But there were also some previously unknown song titles like “Message In A Bottle,” “Forever Winter,” “Think About Me,” “Nothing New,” and “The Very First Night.”
GUYS ITS A CROSSWORD pic.twitter.com/0EWG4yY1yH
— Jelle Verbeek (@jelleverbeek) August 5, 2021
1-All too well ten minute version
2-Better man
3-Ronan
4-Babe
5-Nothing new
6-Message in a bottle
7-Forever winter
8-Think about me
9-The very first nights
feat. Ed Sheeran
feat. Chris Stapleton
feat. Phoebe Bridgers #RedTaylorsVersion— Taylor Throwbacks🧣 (@ThrowbackTaylor) August 5, 2021
Before the internet could totally figure the puzzle out, Swift followed up her initial post with another hint.
“Your next clue will be in the spot where you hear red…,” she wrote, which fans took to refer to a lyric from the album’s title track about “trying to solve a crossword and realizing there’s no right answer.”
Your next clue will be in the spot where you hear red…
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) August 5, 2021
Swift ended her social media spree on Thursday with a photo of herself and one of her cats with the words “I Unlocked The Vault” written across it, indicating that many of the previously unreleased songs embedded in the puzzle will be included on the album.
In June, she announced that the new version of the beloved 2012 album will contain a whopping 30 songs ― one of which she teased is “even ten minutes long.”
“Musically and lyrically, ‘Red’ resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end,” she said. “Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.”
“Red (Taylor’s Version)” is set for release on Nov. 19.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
