Taylor Swift Wrote and Recorded ‘I Knew It, I Knew You’ in 8 Hours

Fortunately, it’s not just Taylor Swift‘s cats that get the zoomies.

On the day that “Toy Story 5” hit theaters, the pop superstar took to X to post a brief video clip of herself speaking to the camera on the day that “I Knew It, I Knew You” was written and recorded. And in her telling, it really was just a day, at least for the primary work on the song, as Swift had a meeting set to play it for Bob Iger at 9 p.m. … after not sitting down for a screening of the film until 11 a.m. that morning.

She attributed her being able to complete the writing and basic recording in eight hours or less to, of course, loving the film but also having a case of “the songwriter zoomies.”

“Been kind of a hectic day,” Swift tells the camera, holding a set of headphones in front of a studio console, as an engineer cheerfully looks on. “At 11 a.m., went to go see ‘Toy Story 5,’ got so inspired, got the songwriter zoomies, went home, wrote the end credit song for ‘Toy Story 5.’ We have now produced it, and I’m doing vocals. It’s 6:57 p.m. In two hours, Bob Iger and Tom from Pixar are coming to hear it. We have not recorded it yet. And I think this is one of the most fun days of my life.”

If she indeed kept to that 9 p.m. meeting, and her screening would have ended around 1, that means she traveled home and wrote and recorded the song all in the space of about eight hours (likely not counting mixing and other touch-up work that would have followed).

The “Tom” is presumably Tom Porter, Pixar’s VP of production. Presumably, the song had a friend in Iger and Porter, as comments made by producers have indicated that they did not ask for changes in Swift’s contribution, which was co-written and co-produced by Jack Antonoff (who is not seen in the video snippet).

The exact day this went down isn’t revealed in the video. Stars of the film revealed at the New York premiere that they weren’t officially notified Swift had an end-titles theme until shortly before the public did, but that likely had more to do with the secrecy surrounding all new Swift music than it truly coming in at the last second. Her 9 p.m. meeting with Iger and Porter was most likely a self-imposed deadline, set up in the confidence she was ready to do a fast turnaround, since Swift noted in an earlier message that she had seen the film “in its early stages,” and not the finished version.

“I’ve always dreamed of getting to write for these characters who I’ve adored since I was a 5 year old kid watching the first Toy Story movie,” she wrote in her first message announcing the song. “I fell instantly in love with ‘Toy Story 5’ when I was lucky enough to see it in its early stages, and I wrote this song as soon as I got home from the screening. Sometimes you just know, right?”