Taylor Swift's Mysterious Message Has Fans Freaking Out
Taylor Swift announced in 2019 that she would be re-releasing her Big Machine discography, and the first re-released album was "Fearless (Taylor's Version)," which dropped in April, per Pitchfork. The singer was not content just revealing the tracklist of the project, and instead teased fans with a cryptic word scramble on social media. "The vault door is about to be as unhinged as you'll think I am after you watch this video," she tweeted. Swift included a video of a vault that displayed the scrambled song titles one week before the updated "Fearless" was released. Die-hard fans took the opportunity to do detective work and decoded the songs.
On June 18, the "Shake It Off" singer posted a photo on Instagram of herself sitting in a cherry-red convertible while rocking a red cap. She included a lengthy caption that revealed her next project "Red (Taylor's Version)" would drop on November 19. "Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person," Swift wrote. "It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end." The pop star confirmed on July 30 that "Ronan" would appear on "Red," per Billboard. That song was about Ronan Thompson who died of cancer at 4 years old, and Swift emailed his mother Maya Thompson (who was a credited co-writer) to ask her permission to re-release the heartfelt track.
Shortly after "Ronan" was confirmed, Swift dropped more Easter eggs and this time Swifties had their work cutout for them.
Fans uncovered featured guest appearances
Similar to the re-release of her previous album, Taylor Swift used a video message with a vault to befuddle fans on August 5. She tweeted, "*presses post* *cackles maniacally* Level: casually cruel in the name of being honest," alongside a video of a red-tinged vault that had 13 word scrambles. Immediately, fans went to work on decoding the "Red (Taylor's Version)" tracklist.
Most fans were left stumped as they repeatedly watched the video to piece together clues. "Blondie was offended we decoded Fearless VTs so fast, she doubled down," one fan replied. Even the official Twitter account for the game Uno voiced frustration by tweeting, "I'm a crumpled piece of paper." One fan tweeted a photo of all 13 of the word scrambles written out on a piece of paper and added, "luckily i have no plans today xox." A savvy code-cracker pointed out the clues should be stacked on each other to form a word search puzzle. "Guys its a crossword," they tweeted while including a photo that combined the word jumbles. That Twitter user found over 20 words, including "Forever," "Babe," "Nothing," and "Bottle."
The most telling words that fans uncovered were the names of other artists that would be featured on the project. Phoebe Bridgers, Ed Sheeran, and Chris Stapleton's names were all revealed in the puzzle. As noted by Variety, Sheeran was already expected to be featured after appearing on the original 2012 version of the album for the song "Everything Has Changed."