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As one of the globe’s most documented pop stars—and Vogue’s September issue cover star!— there’s not much the world doesn’t know about Taylor Swift. But there are some facts about her that even the biggest Swifties may be surprised to learn. Take the new material off her much-anticipated upcoming album, Lover: Did you know she had to film one of the music videos in complete silence? (More on that below.) Or, you may wonder where Swift gets her singing skills (hint: it runs deep in the family). Below, five things you likely never knew about her.
The singer has a thing for symbols. Take the 2017 music video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” where a headstone in a graveyard scene read NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For.” In her new music videos for “ME!” and “You Need to Calm Down,” she dropped in some other hidden Easter eggs.
She was named after another singer-songwriter: James Taylor. The two singers actually ended up sharing the stage in 2011. (You haven’t heard “Fire and Rain” until you’ve heard it with T.Swift.) Taylor has gushed about being named after him in the past. “It’s hugely flattering and was a delightful surprise when she told me that,” Taylor said. “She told me that her mom and dad had been really, deeply into my music, and I got a real kick out of the fact that she’d been named after me. Obviously it wasn’t her choice, it was her mom and dad, but nonetheless, a great connection, I think.”
Swift filmed her entire “You Need to Calm Down” music video in complete silence. Well, not quite silence, but for security reasons, the song was never played aloud during the shoot. As discovered in her September cover story, the cast—which included Katy Perry, the cast of Queer Eye, Adam Rippon, and Todrick Hall—all had to wear earpieces while filming, to sing along to. “Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence,” wrote Abby Aguirre, who profiled her.
She had an unconventional upbringing: Swift was raised on a Christmas tree farm. “I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head,” Swift told Rolling Stone. “It has cemented in me this unnatural level of excitement about fall and then the holiday season. My friends are so sick of me talking about autumn coming. They’re like, ‘What are you, an elf?’ ” she once said. “We all had jobs. Mine was picking the praying mantis pods off of the trees, collecting them so that the bugs wouldn’t hatch inside people’s houses.”
Singing runs in the family: Swift’s maternal grandmother was an opera singer and even hosted a television show in Puerto Rico. “She was always singing, either around the house, or every single Sunday she’d get up and sing in front of the entire congregation at church,” Swift once said. Her grandparents, who were married for more than half a century and died a week apart, also informed T.Swift’s fairy-tale idea of true love. “They were still madly in love with each other in their 80s.”
Watch Taylor Swift Take Over Go Ask Anna:
