Taylor Swift Teases ‘Red’ Track List With Coded Messages

Did you figure out the clues?

Taylor Swift Teases ‘Red’ Track List With Coded Messages
Taylor Swift; Photo credit: Beth Garrabrant

Taylor Swift announced in June that her 2012 album Red will be the next project she will be re-releasing as “Taylor’s Version,” and today, she gave fans a coded tease about the upcoming project. In a short video posted by the singer on Thursday (8/5), seemingly scrambled words are seen coming out of a vault as leaves fall around them. The entire video has a red tint, as the words are related to her Red album.

“*presses post* *cackles maniacally* Level: casually cruel in the name of being honest,” Swift wrote alongside the coded post, referencing lyrics from “All Too Well.”

Swift’s eagle-eyed fans quickly surmised that the scrambled words are one big crossword puzzle, and they soon began figuring it out. Fans on Twitter claim to have found various words within the puzzle, including “Stapleton,” “zyn,” “Ronan,” “Phoebe,” “Bridgers,” and “better.” These words may refer to collaborations with artists such as Phoebe Bridgers and “better” may refer to “Better Man,” a song she wrote and pitched to Little Big Town. Other words found by fans include “nothing,” “message,” “winner,” “nights,” and more.

These words could point to songs featured on the album and/or artists collaborating with Swift. Specifically, the words may also refer to songs Swift is releasing “from the vault” or previously unreleased songs. Swift shared a similar tease/decoding video prior to releasing Fearless (Taylor’s Version). The coded words in that tease ended up referring to the “from the vault” songs.

In a social media post from June, Swift announced Red (Taylor’s Version) would be her next reissued album by posting a reimagined photo of the Red album cover along with a lengthy caption. She revealed that the project will feature 30 tracks and it will be released on November 19.

“Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person,” wrote Swift. “It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.”

“This will be the first time you hear all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red. And hey, one of them is even ten minutes long,” she added.