Taylor Swift’s “I Know It, I Knew You” track for Toy Story 5 is so much more than meets the eye — or ear, that is.
“The word daze is spelled ‘d-a-z-e’ in the lyrics, but you could also, if you wanted to think of it as days ‘d-a-y-s’ you could perceive it as that,” Swift, 36, said during an interview on iHeartCountry House Party aired on Saturday, September 5. “But, I thought of it, like, a childhood daze you look back and you see this sort of blurry, beautiful memory that’s kind of blurry at the edges and blades of the grass in summer that harkens back to childhood and playing and using your imagination.”
“I knew you / Through the daze of the blades of the grass in summer,” Swing sings on the song featured on the Toy Story 5 soundtrack, which dropped in June. “Parachutes / For the free fall of being younger / I memorized the sound of your bare footsteps.”
Swift wrote an original song for the latest installment of the beloved Pixar films, centering the track around cowgirl figurine Jessie (voiced by Joan Cusack) and her beloved first owner, Emily. (Jessie had long been abandoned when Emily grew up and subsequently left behind her unused toys.)
“There’s the added meaning of they’re toys, they can only see up to the height of blades of grass,” Swift added on IHeartCountry of her lyrical inspiration. “‘Parachutes for the free fall of being younger.’ There’s the actual parachute army toys in Toy Story, as well as symbolically, somebody who helps you grow up, helps your landings be softer.”
Swift penned the track, a return to her country music roots, after watching an early cut of the feature film.
“For Jessie, I feel like the line, ‘I watched you drive around the bend for what I thought would be the last time I saw my friend,’ that hits me really hard because that movie just broke my heart,” Swift recalled during an appearance on the film’s accompanying 20/20 special in June. “So I’m really happy to, like, give her a happy moment. ”
For Swift, she felt particularly “grateful” to follow in composer Randy Newman’s footsteps. (Newman, 82, created the music for the entire Toy Story franchise. Swift is the only other musician to lend her voice to the animated franchise.)
“I felt wonderful knowing that I had Randy’s blessing to write for this film, given that I’m the first songwriter to get to partake in the Toy Story world outside of Randy,” Swift added at the time. “I was absolutely dazzled by [the movie]. It is my favorite Toy Story movie. Don’t mind me, just really liked the movie.”
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