Another Taylor Swift album re-record, another increasingly complex vault title track puzzle. And this one is possibly the hardest yet. But if you’re stumped, you can relax: Swift’s legions of fans have come to your rescue by collecting all the clues, along with their corresponding answers.
Over the weekend, fans discovered that googling “Taylor Swift” produced an animated blue vault widget leading to a message of “It’s waiting for you” — yes, almost the exact lyric from the chorus of “Welcome to New York,” the first track from “1989.”
Next, the search prompted viewers to “Help unlock the vault!” by joining a global effort to solve a brain-breaking 33 million puzzles together, which is supposed to reveal the bonus tracks from Swift’s re-recorded “1989.” But it’s been a while since this started and even the expert-level Swifties aren’t sure how many levels of this complex puzzle they’ll need to solve to get the prize.
That’s where this master spreadsheet comes in. Assembled by r/TaylorSwift on Reddit, the open document allows fans to enter in all the clues they have encountered — with their answers, of course — as they’re solved. According to the document, there are 89 total. A lot, yes, but at least it’s not one thousand, nine hundred and eighty nine.
Related, the singer posted a clip of the signature sky blue “washing machine,” as it has become affectionately known, surrounded by flapping seagulls, on her Instagram Tuesday. All that spilled out of the safeguard device were the following letters and punctuation: TS”Ui.” She captioned the video with “You can tell me when the ‘search’ is over … if the high was worth the pain,” referencing a lyric from “Blank Space.”
As they did with Ticketmaster earlier this year, Swifties managed to “break Google” soon after the vault was launched. While some fans were able to quickly access the puzzles and begin solving, many repeatedly googled Taylor Swift’s name to no avail, leaving more than a few diehards stressed and worried that the puzzles would never get solved.
Accessing the vault also hasn’t been a consistent experience for those who are lucky enough to solve a few puzzles in the first place. Throughout the first night, there were plenty of instances in which new puzzles failed to load, or answers weren’t recorded. But still, Swifties persevered — anything for their Queen.
Slated to release Oct. 27, “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” marks the fourth of six albums that Swift will re-record so that she can own the rights fully. Each re-recorded album comes with bonus tracks “From the Vault,” which didn’t make the cut for the original versions of these albums. Swifties clamor for the title tracks to the vault songs, some of which feature other musical artists, and Swift has created fun puzzles for most of her vault batches in the past. Solving the puzzles reveal how many vault tracks there are, their titles and any featured artists.
Past vaults for “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version) presented Swifties with scrambled versions of the title tracks and a more ‘casually cruel’ word search jumble, respectively. “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” did not receive a vault teaser.
And by the way, this isn’t the only way Swift has managed to do some damage to the Internet today. Earlier Tuesday she also urged fans to register to vote on Vote.org, and according to the group’s communication director, as a direct result the site averaged 13,000 users every 30 minutes.
