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You can’t spell Toy Story without TS, and Taylor Swift just made sure her fans never forget it.
After a weekend of cryptic “TS” billboards popping up everywhere from Los Angeles to London to Mexico City, plus clouds mysteriously replacing the seagulls on her 1989 (Taylor’s Version) cover art, Swift finally let the secret out of the toy box on June 1. The countdown clock on her website ticked to zero, and there it was: an original song called I Knew It, I Knew You, written for Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story 5. The single hits streaming and stores this Friday, June 5, with the film galloping into theaters June 19.
From Bedroom Floor to the Big Screen: Inside Taylor Swift’s Toy Story Dream
“It’s a Toy Story. You knew it,” Swift teased in her Instagram announcement, leaning all the way into the pun. She went on to share that this was a full-circle moment decades in the making. “I’ve always dreamed of getting to write for these characters who I’ve adored since I was a 5 year old kid watching the first Toy Story movie,” she wrote, adding that she fell “instantly in love” with the new film after an early screening and rushed home to write the song that same night. “Sometimes you just know, right?”
Here’s the part that has longtime Swifties losing it: the track marks a genuine return to her country roots, the genre that launched her career back in the curls-and-cowboy-boots era. Inspired by fan-favorite cowgirl Jessie (voiced by Joan Cusack) and her emotional arc that stretches all the way back to Toy Story 2, the song reunites Swift with her most trusted collaborator, Jack Antonoff, fresh off her record-shattering album The Life of a Showgirl.
Director Andrew Stanton couldn’t stop gushing about Swift’s instinct for the material, saying her connection to Jessie felt so natural that the song seemed like it had always belonged to the franchise.
This isn’t Swift’s first animated rodeo, either. She voiced Audrey in 2012’s The Lorax and once popped up as herself on Phineas and Ferb. But writing an original for Toy Story, alongside returning legends Tom Hanks and Tim Allen as Woody and Buzz, feels like the kind of childhood-dream milestone money can’t buy.
Fans can already pre-order three Collector’s Edition CDs: the film version, an acoustic cut, and a piano arrangement, each with unique vocals. To infinity, and beyond, indeed.
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