It’s a Toy Story, baby just say “meh”…
[Video]
[5.75]
Al Varela: Being a Taylor Swift fan is like being a fan of Jekyll and Hyde, where Hyde is the manic, capitalistic monopoly that is Taylor Swift’s brand. She’s an authentic and unmistakably unique songwriter, for better or worse, but you don’t become the biggest artist in the world without industry control and knowhow, and a lot about this single is blatantly calculated. There’s this cool new Toy Story sequel that focuses on Jessie, for whom Taylor can write a song, with the added bonus of marketing her return to country music, and also “Taylor Swift” has the same initials as “Toy Story”… it’s a great business deal, and a Trojan horse for Taylor to finally get that Oscar she’s been craving since Cats (2019). But just like the Toy Story franchise, Taylor Swift puts a lot of effort and care into her music, and “I Knew It, I Knew You” is no exception. Taylor’s voice is inviting as she reminisces on a long-standing friendship and how even after all this time and all these life changes, that smile never changed, nor did their love for one another. I’m a sucker for songs about strong, platonic bonds that don’t necessarily have to be romantic, and Taylor is particularly good at this. Her little descriptions and hyperspecific memories are delivered with so much warmth and kindness, and it works for a movie that also focuses on lifelong friendship and memory. Admittedly, Jack Antonoff’s production doesn’t have the texture and lived-in weight that a typical country producer would have given her (it sounds more like a poppier folklore song than a return to country), but I’m not one to turn down a good harmonica when I hear it.
[8]
Claire Davidson: Taylor Swift has made dozens of songs like “I Knew It, I Knew You” before, built on nostalgic reconnections with partners she thought were lost to time. Though this is a song for a movie soundtrack—for the fifth installation of the Toy Story franchise, no less—the details of the story are largely confined to faint sense memories of young lovers frolicking in the grass, an image that feels remarkably hoary even for a woman who has never left the realm of high school metaphors. Like Joan Cusack’s Jessie, the plastic doll character whose narrative this track is meant to mirror, “I Knew It, I Knew You” wears its country influence like a kitschy affectation. Its gestures at Americana are limited to a meandering harmonica line and some faint touches of banjo buried deep in the mix. This song’s conceit is routine for Swift, but she abandons the simple touches of intimacy that would make its central reunion resonant in favor of a jauntily galloping hook that eludes a real groove. The result is a track that won’t let the audience in on its own joke, a strangely counterintuitive move for a product this populist.
[5]
Andrew Karpan: In accomplishing total hegemony, the Swiff-Antonoff sound advances to what might be its final form, a kind of soft bludgeoning of pure schmaltz that makes the case for all pop music eventually leaning toward Billy Joel as a gravitational force. It sounded perfectly lovely, and I couldn’t remember a single word from it.
[4]
Nortey Dowuona: Antonoff seems to have composed this with the entire Bleachers crew, which at least reminds me that having two drummers in a band, even a studio-crafted one, can truly be an asset. The song itself, though, reminds me why Taylor isn’t meant for the synthetic textures of 1982 pop but for the bright strings of 2004 country.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Harmonica! Competing against Elle Langley and Olivia Rodrigo, she releases expert retrenchment — a morsel to those in her fanbase who wishes she’d return to her Funny Early Songs.
[5]
Katherine St. Asaph: As 1 Corinthians and Toy Story teach, we must all grow up and leave behind the things of our childhood. Taylor Swift, 20 years removed from her career in country music, can no longer convincingly make it.
[1]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I genuinely thought she was no longer capable of this kind of fundamentally sound, largely anonymous craft-work; certainly she’s never sounded closer to Bonnie Raitt or Richard Thompson. As with “Lover” seven years ago, the stateliness of this form suits her well; even the most Swiftian turns of phrase (“All your blues like a mood ring changing colors”?) blend in better than anything on her last three albums.
[7]
Ian Mathers: This had all kinds of potential to be disastrous, but it’s perfectly fine soundtrack wallpaper with a sturdy enough melody. The lyrics aren’t doing much — although along with the video, do they imply there’s some sort of love triangle or throuple situation going on in the Toy Story movies? — but leaning into the specifics of the setting probably would have been a mistake.
[6]
Hannah Jocelyn: This gets a pass purely because it has no allusions to Travis Kelce’s Woody.
[6]
Alex Clifton: If this were a standalone song, I’d probably like it more. It’s nice to hear Swift return to the country sound she built her name on, a suitable throwback for a franchise built increasingly on nostalgia. The problem is that this is for Toy Story, and this series has two of my all-time favourite songs written for movies (obviously “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” and “When She Loved Me,” which has been making me cry since 1999). You cannot hold a candle to either one. If this wins an Oscar, I will be actively annoyed.
[5]
Julian Axelrod: I wish we got a behind-the-scenes feature of Taylor worshiping at the feet of Randy Newman a la the Andrew Lloyd Webber video from Cats (2019) — chopping it up, laying down harmonica licks, waxing poetic about Jessie’s psyche, etc. I’m oddly fond of her commitment to exclusively doing soundtrack songs for the most random movies imaginable.
[7]
Taylor Alatorre: It’s a conscious choice for the blaring reeds of a harmonica to be the first sound out of the gate. As pop music scene-setting, the harmonica persists as a one-dimensional totem, an Instant Americana mix that can be added to any old click-tracked, overdubbed stew. Its aims are not nostalgia so much as lineage, the fashioning of an unbroken and traversable link between past and present, with the future a distant afterthought at most. It’s fake history in the Main Street, U.S.A. sense, and like a good post-structuralist I’m supposed to dismiss it with a Bronx cheer and an MSG wedding joke. And yet… Toy Story. The context cries out to me, and it tells me to love this polyethylene soul music, to cherish all of its gleaming, honking falseness. Childhood deposits its lies in us, and the ones we tenaciously cling onto are so often the ones that become us: “Parachutes / For the free fall of being younger.” The big kidult lie here is not that our toys are alive, but that, with a single glance through a window, a long-lost connection can be brought back to life in exactly its original form, like loading a save file for the first time in 20 years. Swift is careful to indulge in this Hallmark fantasy without fully investing in it; notice how “I knew you” and “I loved you” are always in past tense. And beyond the moment of the re-encounter, nothing transpires between the two characters other than the word “hi,” suggesting a friendship that’s necessarily been pared down to its factory-setting minimum. I don’t view this as a pessimistic take on the song, though, because for the majority of people, “hi” is more than they’ll ever get from these fantasized reconnections. “I Knew You” instantly vaults into the Swift canon because it daydreams adulthood in the grandiose manner of a precocious and media-literate child, one who was “raised on promises” like Tom Petty’s “American Girl.” Isn’t it indeed so painful when something so close is still so far out of reach? “I Knew It, I Knew You” dares to answer: it doesn’t have to be. Not if you play along for these few minutes, and burrow so deeply into the Hollywood dream that for a moment it seems the only possible reality.
[9]