Taylor Swift has been generous lately about jumping on as a featured artist for duet versions of some of her BFFs’ existing tracks. She did it last year by joining a remix of Haim’s “Gasoline,” and she’s doing it now, in a higher-profile way, by lending not just her voice but some new lyrics to Ed Sheeran‘s romantic ballad “The Joker and the Queen.”
It may officially be his track, but the music video that accompanies it is a sequel to another duet of theirs that went out under her official imprimatur 10 years ago, 2012’s “Everything Has Changed,” and reunites Ava Ames and Jack Lewis, the boy and girl who flirted with and befriended one another as preteens, now grown up and gone to college, with the same actors.
The cat was let out of the bag about Swift’s participation when eagle-eyed fans spotted her name having been added to publishing credits. Among the new card-referencing lyrics in her verse: “I’ve been played before, if you hadn’t guessed / So i kept my cards close to my foolproof vest /… Then you went all in and we left together… / When I fold, you see the best in me.”
The new duet marks the fifth collaboration on record between Sheeran and Swift, all of the prior instances having been on Swift albums: “Everything Has Changed” (2012) and “End Game” (2017), followed by two songs that appeared on her “Red (Taylor’s Version)” album last year, the previously unrecorded “Run (Taylor’s Version)” and a freshly cut remake of “Everything Has Changed.”
Although many Swifties have accepted the star’s prior directives not to stream the Big Machine versions of her older recordings, they may get a pass for logging in to revisit the “Everything Must Change” video to remember what the stars of that clip looked like 10 years ago. It’s also an opportunity to recall what Sheeran and Swift looked like in 2012, since they made cameos at the very end of the video, as either older siblings or very young parents to the two young stars. That decade-old clip has 373 million views on YouTube. Alas, the new video does not include appearances by the stars, so fans may never know what happened to those supporting characters.
