Taylor Swift has written a new Toy Story song for Jessie, and it arrives with a problem that no amount of polish can fully erase: Randy Newman already set an almost impossible standard for that corner of the franchise. Her song, I Knew It, I Knew You, is built as an answer to When She Loved Me, the aching Toy Story 2 ballad Newman released in 1999.
That is why Swift is being searched now. She did not just contribute another track to a Pixar sequel; she stepped directly into one of the most durable emotional spaces in modern family film music, then acknowledged the scale of the task herself. In a post about the song, she called Newman “incomparable” and told him, “You created the Toy Story musical world, and we are lucky to get to live in it.”
The new song is meant for Jessie, and it is described as a moment of gentle elation rather than a ballad, with Jessie and Emily presumably reunited in the lyric’s emotional frame. It also lands at a time when the toys in Toy Story 5 are facing a more literal threat: obsolescence from tablets and AI playthings. That gives Swift’s contribution a different job from Newman’s original. It is not trying to break the listener; it is trying to open a door, softly, into a sequel about replacement and survival.
Even so, the comparison does not flatter her by accident. Newman’s songs for the Disney Pixar series are described as some of the greatest soundtrack work ever written, and When She Loved Me remains the kind of song that can define a character for a generation. Swift’s track is strong enough to be heard as a genuine reply, but it is also chasing a song that has long since become part of the franchise’s emotional architecture. Jack Antonoff is back on production after rumors their working relationship had faltered, and the sax at the end carries his telltale blare, which keeps the record rooted in Swift’s current sound even as it reaches back toward country-inflected storytelling.
That makes the unanswered question less about whether Swift belongs in Toy Story and more about whether this song can become more than a respectful echo. Her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, was her worst-received record, so this feels like a return to a form that plays to her strengths: narrative, character and plainspoken feeling. If I Knew It, I Knew You lasts, it will be because it finds its own place beside Newman rather than trying to replace him.
