Taylor Swift Teases Collabs With Ed Sheeran, Phoebe Bridgers & More On ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’

After Taylor Swift dropped a cryptic video about ‘Red (Taylor's Version'), fans suspect it will feature Ed Sheeran, Chris Stapleton, and Phoebe Bridgers!

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August 5, 2021 12:58PM EDT
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Taylor Swift Taylor Swift 'The Eras Tour' concert, State Farm Stadium, Glendale, Arizona, USA - 17 Mar 2023
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At this point, it seems like the Taylor Swift fandom could have figured out the identity of the Zodiac Killer, the location of Blackbeard’s treasure, and what is exactly located in Area 51. On Thursday (Aug. 50, Taylor, 31, opened up her vault and unleashed a game for all her fans. “*presses post* *cackles manically* Level: casually cruel in the name of being honest,” she captioned the video, citing a lyric from “All Too Well,” a song from her album, Red. Out came thirteen “words,” each a jumble of letters that made no sense at first glance.

However, it didn’t take long for Swifties to realize this video was regarding Red (Taylor’s Version), the re-recorded rendition of that 2012 album that Taylor’s releasing in November. Each of the thirteen words was thirteen letters long. When placed in a 13×13 grid, fans realized it was a “word search” puzzle. Swifties soon found the words “Phoebe,” “Bridgers,” “Ed,” “Sheeran,” “Chris,” and “Stapleton,” suggesting that this coming album will feature Phoebe Bridgers, Ed Sheeran, and Chris Stapleton.

Other things that fans found in this include “Better Man,” “Babe,” “Ronan,” “Message In A Bottle,” “Forever Winter,” “Think About Me,” “Nothing New,” “The Very First Night,” and “All Too Well (Ten Minute Version).” Taylor suggested the latter when she first announced Red (Taylor’s Version) in June. “This will be the first time you hear all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red,” she wrote. “And hey, one of them is even ten minutes long.” Taylor included a scarf emoji in her post, which was a wink to a line in the song (“But you keep my old scarf from that very first week ’cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me”).

Taylor Swift poses for a portrait in Los Angeles in 2012 ahead of Red‘s release. (Matt Sayles/Invision/AP/Shutterstock)

At 5:27, “All Too Well” is the longest song on Red. Taylor and co-writer Liz Rose have suggested a longer version of the song in past interviews, including a 10-minute version that didn’t make the album’s final cut. “It was a day when I was just, like, a broken human, walking into rehearsal just feeling terrible about what was going on in my personal life,” Swift recalled of the origins of “All Too Well” on a podcast with Rolling Stone, per Billboard. “I ended up sort of just playing four chords over and over again, and the band started kicking in … People just started playing along with me. I think they could tell I was really going through it. I just started singing and riffing and sort of ad-libbing this song that basically was ‘All Too Well.’ It started with, ‘I walked through the door with you, the air was cold.’ It literally just was that song, but it had probably seven extra verses, and it included the F-word.”

“Basically, I remember my sound guy was like, ‘Hey, I burned a CD of that thing that you were doing in case you want it,’ ” she added. “I ended up taking it home and listening to it, and I was like, ‘I actually really like this, but it definitely is like 10 minutes long, and I need to pare it down.’ ” Taylor’s official webstore is selling both a clean and explicit version of the album, suggesting that Taylor had planned to drop some F-bombs much sooner than folklore.