Taylor Swift was 5 years old when she watched the first Toy Story movie. Pixar magic was completely new to her she shared with reporters during a Critics Choice Awards virtual press conference and it opened up her imagination.
The singer-songwriter, who is campaigning for an Oscar nomination for her song “I Knew It, I Knew You” from Toy Story 5, recalled thinking, “Wait a second! What are my toys going through? I never thought about that before. [I thought] that’s crazy. I should play a little nicer.”
Since then, Swift, who says she holds the films in “reverence,” has come to realize just how expansive and introspective Toy Story stories are.
“It is insane that they are able to layer so many revelations, lessons, learning moments, real life stuff in with these toys that are cracking you up, making you laugh and making you feel like some of them remind you of certain friends in your life,” she recalls. It’s such an interesting and magnificent achievement they’ve made in terms of storytelling.”
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So, when Swift was invited to write a song for the film, she didn’t hesitate, but she roped in one her favorite collaborators, Jack Antonoff, to co-write and co-produce it.
Set two years after Toy Story 4, Toy Story 5 follows Jessie as she, Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the other toys deal with the presence of Lilypad, a tablet and Bonnie’s new favorite plaything.
Swift’s song “I Knew It, I Knew You,” the final song of the film, was written for Jessie, the cowgirl, and Swift admits it wasn’t until recently that she could relate to her.
“When I was watching this film, I was so struck by the lessons that Jessie learned and I think that they resonated with me because they were lessons I’ve learned in my life and maybe I wouldn’t have been able to write this song until I was in my 30s because it takes you a long time to process and perceive memory with acceptance and that’s, I think, the most beautiful thing that Jessie learns in this film.”
Swift also says that in writing “I Knew It, I Knew You,” she took into consideration Randy Newman, who has been the composer and songwriter for the entire Toy Story franchise, especially his original song “You’ve Got a Friend In Me.” She says performing with him at the film’s premiere is hands down her favorite moment of working on the movie.
“I just felt like I was in a dream sequence or something, because when you hear him play the intro notes of ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’ you just can’t believe that’s happening in front of you live. I never thought I’d ever get to hear that live. It’s just unreal. He’s so funny, he’s so quick-witted. He was adding all these jokes and ad libs into the live performance that we hadn’t done at soundcheck, and I just feel like getting to meet someone who’s such a sparkly person was just unbelievable. I’m so grateful to him for welcoming me into the fold like that.”
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Below is more of the interview with Swift:
Jessie’s previous song “When She Loved Me” was so iconic and beloved. How did it move you and how did your memory of that song flavor your approach?That song is so perfect and devastating that there are times that I will just think about it and feel like I’m going to cry. I don’t even need to hear it to feel that way. It’s so potent and it’s so powerful and it’s really sorrow and heartbreak and grief in its purest form that song, and it’s interesting because Jessie is this character who on her surface is so bold, brave, and courageous and will do anything for her friends. She’s a risk taker. She’s wild and she’s extroverted but she has these deep wells of sorrow in her based on this experience she had with her former kid Emily, and that song “When She Loved Me” so perfectly encapsulates the grief that has shaped her and that she carries around with her pretty much every day.
I think that with “I Knew It, I knew You,” I wanted to acknowledge that for her loss of Emily to have mattered this much to her, for Jessie to have carried it for the rest of her life for all these decades, it mattered to her so much. I think there was a lot of hopelessness and feeling of pointlessness and wondering if it meant absolutely nothing to Emily and when she reaches this revelation in this film that actually she did matter, you can be there for someone for a time in their life and make an impact that can be enough to really mean something. I wanted to kind of hint at “When She Loved Me” and then heal it, and that was a gift I wanted to give Jessie. As a fan of hers for all these years and someone who loves that character, I wanted her to have that moment of healing that wound.
Jessie started out as a character who is afraid of being forgotten, but she’s grown into someone who understands her own worth. You’ve also reinvented yourself throughout your career while staying connected to your roots. How do you see a little of yourself and Jessie and her journey?I think that’s a wonderful question. It’s interesting because being in the entertainment industry, I’ve always just felt like it’s harder to hit a moving target. Once people feel like they’ve figured you out creatively and they’ve figured out what you can do, they usually move into the discardment phase and so that would always be where I would try to pivot and if they think you’re going to zig, you zag instead.
Rather than looking at something as exhausting and daunting, I look at as just a new adventure. Once I’ve done one thing, I look for something else that inspires me.
I feel like with Jessie, she’s always going on these adventures and she’s always trying to help someone new and there’s always something she feels really inspired by and some new challenge ahead of her and she takes them on she takes them on with such fearlessness. Except we see her have this moment of crisis in this film, where she does feel hopeless and she does feel useless and she’s saying to herself, “Am I a bad toy? Does any of this matter?” And it’s that moment that just breaks your heart because you’re like, “No Jessie and then you get that amazing resolution — obviously no spoilers — but in the film she reaches a place that was ultimately what inspired me to write the song I wrote.
Randy Newman has been the sound of Toy Story since the beginning. How did your collaboration allow both of your voices to come through?I mean, Randy is one of one. What he’s done in creating this entire world sonically around Toy Story, where it’s identifiable, it’s so singular and unique, and it immediately transports us to those characters, to that world, to where we were when we saw those films, that’s just the ultimate achievement. I’ve been such a fan of Randy Newman’s for so long and so has my co-writer, Jack Antonoff. That’s why I called up Jack, because I really wanted to make this with someone who respects, understands and is a super fan of what Randy does. Because I knew that in order to honor this film and the musical world of it, I’d have to make some stretches creatively, I’d have to reach for some different progressions than I would naturally go to. This is getting sort of granular about it, but like there’s a chord progression that I would never have gone to for one of my albums because I just wouldn’t have thought to stretch in that way. There’s this moment where it’s on that line, like ‘life has ways of leaving those days behind,’ where in one of my songs, I would have gone for an A minor and instead we go to an A7 and then resolve in a D minor, and it almost feels like you’re about to modulate but you don’t.
It’s something that, in my imagination and in Jack’s imagination as Randy Newman fans, we were like, “I wonder if Randy would do this?” We also paid homage to what he’s built with this amazing saga of films. We’ve got tenor sax, we’ve got baritone sax, and they’re kind of playing in a way that is structured a little differently than we would normally do it. We would usually have very organized, structured parts, whereas in our world of trying to reach towards Randy Newman, we felt like it could feel a little bit more like a jam band, with individual players acting as characters, right? You’ve got the saxophone players playing a hook that’s just a musical hook at the same time I’m singing the chorus hook over it. Those are just different choices than we would make for anything of mine.
I think that it was my goal to bring in country elements for Jessie because I think that her time on Woody’s Roundup and her being a cowgirl, I know how to bring that in. We’ve got banjo, we’ve got mandolin, we’ve got harmonica. There’s structural things that I know how to do that I felt would really lend themselves to that part of Jessie, but the Randy side of it that’s really one of the reasons I called Jack, and I was just geeking out about us having this opportunity at all and explaining to him what the film was about. I got home after watching the film, and I went to my piano, and I was like, “Clear your schedule, whatever you’re doing, just FaceTime. We’re writing this right now,’ and that’s what we did.
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What came first when crafting the song, the melody or the lyrics?I think lyrics were what I was spinning out with first. I love the double meaning; I love when something is allegorical and also literal, like the song starts with the line “I knew youthrough the daze of the blades of the grass in summer.” If you think about that as an allegory, it’s youth; it’s the people who knew you when you didn’t wear shoes very often, and you were always outside, and you were always covered in dirt, and you were always sunburnt. That’s a really specific version of you for someone to know.
But in the literal sense, these are toys, so when they’re standing on the ground looking up at their kid, they’re looking through the blades of grass because they’re toys. So, I was just trying to think of double meaning, both figurative and literal lyrics. But also, I really hit on the idea of, “I knew it. I had it right originally.”
I’m a big trust-your-intuition person, and I think that the idea that Jessie’s intuition was that this relationship, this friendship, this mentorship, whatever you want to call it, with her kid, in her mind, she’s raising this kid and she’s playing with this kid every day and she’s teaching this kid how to explore her imagination. Her realizing that it mattered, I thought I knew it. I knew it mattered. I knew I knew you because when Emily leaves, she feels like, “Did I not know you at all?” It was probably lyrics first, but very shortly after it was melody because we were at it pretty quick.
Next, Taylor Swift Reveals the One Condition She Set To Write the Closing Song for Toy Story 5
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