Anytime Taylor Swift drops a new single or posts on social media, her army of fans immediately start scouring every detail for potential clues about new music. This has been going on for a while—sending Swifties on wild scavenger hunts is practically tradition these days.
And it turns out those "clues" are 100 percent intentional. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Swift owns up to planting what the Internet has dubbed "Easter eggs" into her social media posts.
The "Me!" singer jokes in the interview about how she's "trained" her fans to become mini detectives. “I love that they like the cryptic hint dropping," she said. "Because as long as they like it, I’ll keep doing it. It’s fun. It feels mischievous and playful.”
In the interview Swift specifically points to the time she posted what seemed like an innocuous picture of palm trees and stars on her Instagram. Fans, no surprise, interpreted the snap in a million different ways.
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“I posted that the day that I finished the seventh album,” Swift said about the image. “I couldn’t expect [my fans] to know that. I figured they’d figure it out later, but a lot of their theories were actually correct. Those Easter eggs were just trying to establish that tone, which I foreshadowed ages ago in a Spotify vertical video for ‘Delicate’ by painting my nails those [pastel] colors.”
That, of course, is not the only example of Swift leaving clues in her music. Other instances have been pretty well-documented, and they usually lead to theories about what she's planning to release next. Fans have guessed correctly a number of times: When Swift posed in front of a butterfly mural that read, "Me!" on Instagram, it turned out to be a veiled hint about the name of her most recent single. Then, a few days after the video for the song came out, she shared that the title of her new album was hiding in one of the scenes.
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"There’s a lot of a lot on this album," Swift told EW—including, apparently, some “really, really, really, really sad songs." "[But] not enough to where you need to worry about me," she said. "I’m trying to convey an emotional spectrum. I definitely don’t wanna have too much of one thing…. You get some joyful songs and you get the bops, as they say.”
The album, Swift reveals, is an example of how she's feeling "more comfortable being brave enough to be vulnerable, because my fans are brave enough to be vulnerable with me. Once people delve into the album, it’ll become pretty clear that that’s more of the fingerprint of this—that it’s much more of a singer-songwriter, personal journey than the last one.”
