For Taylor Swift fans, a new album is never just an album. When she announced her 10th record Midnights in October, Swifties knew to expect a flood of Easter eggs, cryptic clues and mysteries in need of solving that would supposedly point to the record’s lyrical content, aesthetic and upcoming tour. Head to Reddit, Twitter or a specific corner of TikTok known as SwiftTok, and you’ll find fans analysing interviews, social media posts and the minutiae of her music videos, from the outfit colours and hairstyles to the significance of different buttons in an elevator in a music video. Each theory is backed up with Sherlockian levels of evidence: facts, figures, quotes and even the number of words used in social media posts all become pieces of a puzzle that may not even exist. It’s all part of the pop star’s plan: “I’ve trained them to be that way,” she has said.
This trail of breadcrumbs began with Swift’s 2006 self-titled debut album, the lyric booklet for which included a rudimentary code that would reveal who or what the songs were about, a practice she continued with 2014’s 1989. The music video for 2017’s Look What You Made Me Do was so overloaded with references and clues that Swift fans are still speculating about what details may or may not be hidden within it. They’re so well trained that they even find patterns that Swift has left unwittingly: prior to the release of 2019’s Lover album, theories proliferated over the significance of the number of holes in a fence in one Instagram post, which turned out to mean nothing at all.
