Taylor Swift has written a new song for Jessie, the cowgirl from Toy Story, and it arrives as a gentle, unusual turn for a pop star whose soundtrack work has rarely lingered. The track, “I Knew It, I Knew You,” is framed as an answer to the emotional terrain Randy Newman mapped more than two decades ago in Toy Story 2.
That makes the song easy to search today and easier still to place in Swift’s career. She has spent the last year and a half writing and revisiting songs with the kind of precision that invites close listening, and she talked to last month about the technicalities of how she sets words and sounds against each other. Here, that attention lands inside Pixar’s world, with Swift acknowledging Newman as “incomparable” and telling him, “You created the Toy Story musical world, and we are lucky to get to live in it.”
The comparison is doing a lot of work because Newman’s “When She Loved Me” has long been one of the franchise’s defining songs. Swift’s new one is not built as a grand heartbreak ballad but as a moment of gentle elation, full of handcrafted care and what one review called the rootsy soul of her country origins. It features organic instrumentation, room sound on the drums and a sax at the end with Jack Antonoff’s telltale blare, all of which gives it a warmth that feels hand-sewn rather than studio-polished. In that sense, the song reads as a clean fit for Jessie, whose story in the Toy Story universe has always been tied to memory, loss and return.
The lyrics lean into that feeling without sounding overwritten. One line describes toys as “parachutes for the free fall of being younger,” and another says Jessie knew “all your blues like a mood ring changing colours.” The effect is to make the song sound less like a franchise tie-in and more like something Swift might have written if she were folding a childhood memory into a country album. That is also why it echoes a line from her 2024 writing, “My boy only breaks his favourite toys,” from The Tortured Poets Department, even as it stands apart from the brittle mood of that record.
There is friction in that contrast. The same review that praises the song’s care also suggests Swift’s latest album, last year’s The Life of a Showgirl, was her worst-received record. That matters because “I Knew It, I Knew You” lands as a reminder of what many fans still seem to want from her: a cleaner melodic line, a sharper emotional pivot and the country-rooted phrasing that made her voice distinctive in the first place. It also underlines how unusual this kind of soundtrack success has been for her. Beyond her Zayn collaboration “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” from Fifty Shades Darker, her film and TV songs have not had much staying power.
What happens next is less certain than the song’s welcome suggests. Toy Story 5 is expected to put its toys in the path of tablets and AI playthings, a plot that raises the stakes for Jessie and the rest of the old crew, but this song’s exact use in the film has not been spelled out. Even so, Swift has already done the main job: she has given Pixar a Jessie song that sounds like it belongs in the Toy Story musical world, and in the process reminded listeners that her strongest moments still come when the writing is both precise and alive.
