Taylor Swift’s Toy Story 5 song felt like both “a musical departure and coming home” for the singer.
After weeks of speculation, the Shake It Off singer officially announced on Monday that she had written a song for the fifth instalment in Pixar’s long-running animated franchise.
She released I Knew It, I Knew You on Friday, with the country song being told from the perspective of cowgirl toy Jessie. In the story told within the song, Jessie is reunited with her original owner.
To celebrate its release, Taylor shared a childhood video of herself wearing a cowboy outfit, complete with a red cowboy hat, and reflected on returning to her country roots since her transition to pop in 2014.
“Writing this song felt like a musical departure and coming home at the same time. Creating something for Jessie was a new challenge and also felt like second nature all at once. And being a @toystory kid from the age of 5 til now… is an adventure I plan to be on, to infinity and beyond,” she wrote.
The pop superstar went on to thank the film’s director, Andrew Stanton, for “imagining me for this” when he started writing the fifth film “all those years ago”, and the franchise’s long-running composer Randy Newman for creating “a gorgeous sonic tapestry of songs and scores” since the 1995 original.
I Knew It, I Knew You marks a reunion between Taylor and her regular collaborator, Jack Antonoff, with whom she has created many pop songs since 2014. However, they did not work together on her most recent album, The Life of a Showgirl.
“We wrote this with so much adoration for these characters that made us laugh and helped us learn lessons and think outside the backyard all throughout our childhoods,” she added. “I Knew It, I Knew You from Toy Story 5 is out everywhere now.”
Toy Story 5 will be released in cinemas on 19 June.
