Taylor Swift made history with her record-breaking Eras Tour back in 2023 — and it took its toll.
Appearing on a Toy Story 5 Q&A panel in NYC on Sunday, November 1, the pop megastar detailed how she came to write the animated film’s end credit song, I Knew It, I Knew You, while simultaneously managing the gruelling demands of her tour.
“I was on a tour that was — a lot of things — but it was pretty physically exhausting,” she recalled, adding, “I’ve actually never experienced this level of exhaustion in between shows.” (Taylor played a total of 149 shows spanning 51 cities across five continents, with each show being three and a half hours long).
READ MORE: Taylor Swift shares sweet anecdote about friendship with Abigal Anderson
The 14-time Grammy winner revealed that whenever she wasn’t on stage, she would be in bed to rest and recover for her next show. So, when Taylor’s brother Austin, who manages elements of her music licensing for multimedia uses, first approached her about Toy Story 5, she was too exhausted to commit.
She told him, “I just tried to get out of bed and felt every bone in my foot crunch. So is there any leeway that I can have a little time to not be on this tour anymore and then I can go see it?”
For several months, Austin continued to push Taylor to go see the film during its production phase, and when she finally found the time, everything clicked. “Finally, it ended up being the right time where I had the bandwidth to absorb and to have any kind of creative output,” she recalled. “And when I saw this brilliant film that Andrew made, I realised exactly why [Austin] knew I would love it.”
Taylor explained that she could relate to “all the characters” and was especially drawn by the film’s focus of “female friendships.”
“It was a struck-by-lightening moment,” she recalled. “I have to go home, get to my piano, and write this song.”
Taylor previously revealed that she wrote, produced, and finished I Knew It, I Knew You in just five hours after coming home from the screening and getting the “songwriter zoomies.”
READ MORE: Taylor Swift explains hidden meaning behind ‘I Knew It, I Knew You’
