Taylor Swift may have offered a winking Easter egg in her new song “So High School.”
A fan recently discovered that there appears to be a parallel between the new track, which appears on The Tortured Poets Department, and “Mary’s Song” from her 2006 debut self-titled album. “Well, I was sixteen when suddenly,” she sings in “Mary’s Song,” which is similar to “So High School,” in which she sings, “Bittersweet sixteen suddenly.”
“She’s insane,” the Swiftie wrote via X, sharing a screenshot of the lyrics side by side.
Swift’s “So High School” has been widely speculated to be about her boyfriend, Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce. In the song, Swift seemingly references the start of their relationship, wherein Kelce, 34, tried to give her a friendship bracelet with his phone number on it. “You knew what you wanted, and boy, you got her,” she sings.
There even seems to be a subtle reference to a viral video of Travis playing a round of “Kiss, Marry, Kill” with Swift, Ariana Grande and Katy Perry back in 2016.
“Are you gonna marry, kiss, or kill me (Kill me) / It’s just a game, but really (Really) / I’m bettin’ on all three for us two (All three),” she sings. (Travis chose to “kiss” Swift, while he “killed” Grande and “married” Perry.)
“Mary’s Song,” meanwhile, was inspired by a longtime married couple who used to live next door to Swift. “They’d been married forever and they came over one night for dinner, and were just so cute,” she recounted in an archive post on her website. “They were talking about how they fell in love and got married, and how they met when they were just little kids.”
She continued, “I thought it was so sweet, because you can go to the grocery store and read the tabloids, and see who’s breaking up and cheating on each other, or just listen to some of my songs, haha. But it was really comforting to know that all I had to do was go home and look next door to see a perfect example of forever.”
While Swift didn’t meet Kelce until 2023, there’s some reason to believe — stick with Us here — that she might have manifested her relationship with the football star in “Mary’s Song.” Proof in point: in one lyric she sings, “And I’ll be 87, you’ll be 89,” which serendipitously correlates to Kelce’s jersey number, 87, and her birth year, 1989.
Some of her other past songs have also offered a surprising amount of manifesting when it comes to her future relationship with Kelce, including 2008’s “You Belong With Me.”
“But she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts / She’s Cheer Captain and I’m on the bleachers,” Swift sang in a music video chock-full of references to a sports star and his romantic interest, who watches him lovingly from the sidelines.
