4 Taylor Swift Easter Eggs and Theories: P.S. from T.S.

Swifties aren’t as crazy as they sound. Here are four of Taylor Swift’s iconic Easter egg moments and one currently unproven theory about what might be coming next.

Written by Tatum McDonald

Illustration by Macie Hartzog

Taylor Swift is infamous for leaving “Easter eggs,” or hidden messages, for her fans about her life and her music. She’s been leaving these little clues since her debut. In 2006 for Taylor Swift, she left secret messages in the liner notes by capitalizing seemingly random letters that added up to words or phrases that gave fans insight into the stories behind the songs.

Swift continued this tradition with her next four albums. Sometimes the messages were sweet, like the hidden phrase in the lyrics for “A Place in this World” that read “I found it.” Others were less so. For the song “Innocent” her message reads, “life is full of little interruptions,” a reference to that one time she got interrupted on the VMAs stage. The one for “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is “when I stopped caring what you thought,” a reference to the ex that thought her music wasn’t “real” music like the “indie records” he liked.

Since her debut, the Easter eggs have grown in size and scope. Even during reputation’s album cycle when Swift declared, “there will be no explanation,there will just be reputation,” she planted Easter eggs everywhere. Here are some of her most memorable Easter egg moments (and one ongoing theory as a bonus).

Not A Lot Going On At The Moment

Sometimes Swift will reference her past to set up content that she releases in the future. In the music video for “22,” Red’s fourth single, Swift wears a T-shirt that says “not a lot going on at the moment.” In the video it’s ironically placed next to scenes where she is doing the opposite of “not a lot,” but years later, when she captioned an Instagram photo with the same sentence, her fans didn’t think it was anything other than a callback. They were more interested in the purple icing in her hair.

Why would they think anything of it? Swift was in the middle of the album cycle for Lover, and, except for her album of exceptions reputation, Swift had stuck to a single-album-tour-break cycle she rinses and repeats every two years. Only later did fans find out that Swift posted that picture right after putting the finishing touches on her surprise album, folklore.

Look What You Made Me Do

Other times the Easter eggs recalled the past. The “Look What You Made Me Do” music video, Swift’s return from the dead, is chock full of Easter eggs. The tombstone at the head of her grave is inscribed with the pen name she used to write a song for a now ex-boyfriend. The T-shirts her background dancers are wearing look like the one a different ex-boyfriend wore to one of her infamous Fourth of July parties. A line-up of past Taylors, with their media-ascribed personalities dressed in some of her most iconic looks, squabble at the end.

There Are Five Holes In The Fence

Swift is aware of the hysteria caused by even the smallest of actions, and she loves to be in on the joke. While teasing the release of her first single from Lover, Swift started posting pictures on Instagram that matched the aesthetic of her upcoming album cycle. One of those was a picture of her seen through a fence. People began to speculate that there had to be some kind of meaning behind the number of holes in the fence. Was it a countdown? What was it counting down to? That time, it wasn't anything more than a picture, but that didn’t mean that was all it could be.

While teasing the music video for the album’s second single, “You Need To Calm Down,” Swift posted an image of a fence with five posts and the caption “there were five posts in the fence.”

Little Things

Swift’s Easter eggs are not always big things. There are many different small examples of her nods towards her fans and past. Any time the number 13 shows up, forward, backward, counting down, or counting up, it’s pointing to something important. For “Delicate”'s vertical video on Spotify, Swift’s prominently featured pastel nails are out of place in the context of reputation’s black and white color scheme. But as reputation’s final single, the visual fittingly leads to what follows, the cotton candy wonderland of Lover. Prior to the release of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Swift started including two yellow hearts in her tweets (yellow being the color most commonly associated with Fearless, her second album). She accepted an American Music Award virtually and started the video facing a wall so the audience could only see the back of her head and her braided hair, alluding to the cover of the yet-to-be-released evermore.

Bonus: The Current Theory

Now you’ll have to bear with me if this starts to sound a little crazy, because sounding crazy is part of the speculating fun.

During an interview with Stephen Colbert in April, Swift showed a poster board collage that plays along with a joke Colbert was making about one of her songs. Pinned to the top of it is a piece of pizza that stands out from everything else, begging the question: What does pizza have to do with “Hey, Stephen?”

Then, on Sept. 30, Joe Jonas posted a picture on Instagram with the caption “Looking for *pizza emoji*,” which on its own means nothing. But then Nick Jonas later posted a video on TikTok that glitched the same way as Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” TikTok. He also responded to a comment that said “Who edited this and are they fired” with a video of him eating a slice of pizza while Swift’s “ME! (feat. Brendon Urie of Panic! At The Disco)” played in the background.

Then — yes, there’s more — Nick posted a video on TikTok under the guise of playing with a new feature that lets you flip the green screen. The image he was flipping was a screen shot from a deuxmoi blind item, the latest form of celebrity gossip, talking about a Jonas Brothers/Taylor Swift collaboration.

Most recently, Joe posted a video on TikTok with the caption “Maybe I Should’ve Said No To This,” a song that the two have previously collaborated on.

Maybe this is all one big 'there are five holes in the fence' incident, or maybe there is something going on, and we’ll see a Jonas Brother/Taylor Swift reunion that will send us straight back to the good old days of 2009.

Unearthing all of Taylor Swift’s little messages can be a daunting task to a novice Swiftie, especially with how much content she has released over the past few years. But with a few examples to jump off, anyone can fall down the rabbit hole.

Afterglow ATXNovember 19, 2021tatum mcdonald, macie hartzog, taylor swift, conspiracy theories, easter eggs, listicle