Leave it to Taylor Swift to use her new Vogue cover story to drop a few Easter eggs. It is the fashion bible's famed September issue, so you can't really blame her for going big. Reading through the interview, it's clear that Swift has thought long and hard (as we've come to expect from the megastar) about the clues she's revealing to fans on her new album, Lover, out Aug. 23, as well as her recently voiced decisive political opinions.
Swift says one of her Lover songs “plays with the idea of perception.” Specifically, how people would perceive her if she was a man, which is very Beyoncé of her. Swift says the song, fittingly titled "The Man," asks the question, “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” According to Vogue, the "synth-pop earworm" features the lines: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”
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When it comes to what it's like to interview Swift, it's clear there are layers to everything she says. Throughout the interview, writer Abby Aguirre looks for secret messages, but Swift only tells people what she wants them to know. One of those things being that living an online life these days isn't so different than living in a dollhouse. Specifically, Swift told Vogue, online lookie loos “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” Do with those clues what you will.
However, it's not until the final section of the piece that Aguirre becomes a full-on Swift conspiracy theorist. It has to do with a gold balloon in the shape of the number seven that flew by the rooftop where she was chatting with Swift about her seventh album. To confirm that it wasn't an "L" Swift apparently stated, “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom."
While Aguirre notes that it would be nearly impossible for Swift to perfectly time this symbolic balloon, she has trouble believing it's a total coincidence. And, it's hard to believe her Swifties will believe so either. In fact, right now, they're probably trying to decipher what this balloon floating by really means.