Taylor Swift fully admits that she likes to leave complicated hints in her songs, music videos, and album art to give fans puzzles to work through. It just happens that “Woodvale,” the mysterious word that was hidden in the background on the cover of her album “Folklore,” is not a hint at the name of an upcoming project, as some fans believed.
No, the truth is it was all just a big mistake.
“Okay, well, this takes a big explanation,” Swift said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Monday. “So, I tend to be sort of annoyingly secret agent-y about dropping clues and hints and Easter eggs. And it’s very annoying but it’s fun for fans and it’s fun for me because they like to pick up on things. And they’ll notice lots of things in music videos and photos or whatever. And then sometimes, I take it too far and I make a mistake. And basically, when I was making ‘Folklore,’ the album that came out back in July, I was too afraid to even unveil the title of the album to even my closest teammates and management. I didn’t tell anybody the album title until right before it came out.”
She continued: “So I came up with a fake code name that had the same amount of letters as ‘Folklore.’ Chose a random name, chose ‘Woodvale.’ Wanted to see how it would look on the album covers, mocked them up and then decided I don’t actually want to have a title on the album covers. And we forgot to take the fake code name off of one of the covers.”
“Yes, that’s what happened,” Swift confirmed when host Jimmy Kimmel asked her if that’s truly the mystery behind “Woodvale.”
Don’t worry, the singer has since learned her lesson and managed to keep “November,” which was the code name for recently dropped album “Evermore,” off the mockups for all the album covers before they were released this time.
Watch Swift’s interview with Kimmel above.