On the last night of Taylor Swift’s record-breaking U.S. leg of the Eras tour she addressed her thousands of fans in sold out SoFi Stadium (and thousands more like myself watching through a grainy livestream). Here on this warm summer night, she announced that 1989 Taylor’s Version would be released October 27th, exactly nine years since the original release. When she announced this release date, she emphasized her excitement in particular for the re-recorded vault tracks because, according to her instagram, she “can’t believe they were ever left behind.”
Over a month since her initial announcement, Swift had remained suspiciously quiet. Until fans began to notice a light blue vault that appeared when her name was searched. On September 19th, Google announced that Swifties could use the Search bar to crack the vault. But getting to the vault tracks was no small task. After clicking on the vault, fans would have to solve a word puzzle that related to Taylor Swift with only a simple clue. The puzzle answers ranged from “pen click” to “elevator buttons” to ” of kisses on cheeks” to “Tokyo”. The majority of these answers related to songs from 1989, but some were related to the Eras tour, her birthday, and more niche Swiftie moments. In total, there were 89 different puzzles to solve. However, simply solving the puzzles was not the biggest challenge in this game. It was the sheer amount of puzzles needed to solve in order to unlock the vault, a whopping 33 million.
But her loyal fans were up to the challenge and flooded Google’s search engine with her name. However, they were soon halted as the amount of traction on the puzzle game caused the program to glitch. Frustrated fans awaited their turn to participate as Google’s twitter reassured that they are in their “fix-it era and will be out of the woods soon”. Once the game was up and running again, Swifties came in at full force and the 33 million puzzles were solved in just 19 hours total.
Four vault tracks were unlocked: “Now That We Don’t Talk,” “Say Don’t Go,” “Suburban Legends,” and “Is It Over Now?” Only the scrambled letters of the fifth vault track were revealed, leading fans to speculate whether they spelled “Slut!” or “Lust!”. Swift announced that it would be the former of the two titles in a post thanking her fans for “playing along, sleuthing, puzzling and making these reveals so much chaotic fun”.
Now all that’s left to anticipate is the release of 1989’s re-recording this next month, although with Swift’s Easter egg antics, it is never unwise for fans to remain vigilant.