The Woodvale theories began when Taylor Swift released 8 special editions of her eight studio album, folklore on CD and vinyl. Soon after the release, a Reddit user found the word "Woodvale" on the top right and "Taylor Swift" on the bottom left of the "Hide and Seek" edition of the album. These were visible on her site, and the CD.
Swift is known for using "clues" of sorts leading to albums, so this made people think that woodvale was a sister album to folklore. These theories were made stronger when her ninth studio album, evermore released so people theorized it would be a trio. Theories ranged from Swift having "sets of 3" in some place (similar to why people theorized her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department would be a triple album) to colorized scrunchies.
The theory went dead for a while, eventually Swift in an interview said it was leftovers of the album's code name, when she wanted the album name to be on it, like her other albums. This however was accidentally left in the release. Some people didn't believe Taylor, and still held out hope.
Taylor Nation released a digital music collection called the "woodvale collection" on December 16, 2020. It included 3 "willow" remixes (moonlit witch, dancing witch and lonely witch) along with unreleased audio (christmas tree farm live in 2019, "willow" instrumental version, "willow" original copywriting demo). It went off-sale on December 17, 2020.
But then on April 20, 2024 at 12:00 AM MST, Swift posted on Twitter that The Tortured Poets Department was a double album. People heard that a lot of the songs on the second half sounded like songs from folklore, or continuations of the story. People said "Cassandra" sounded like "mad woman" people said "The Prophecy" sounded like "the lakes" or "seven". "The Bolter" has a comparable sound to "betty". The song "Peter" however, is what made many fans say "We got Woodvale" it seemed like a direct follow up to The Teenage Love Triangle from folklore.
She said she had written so much tortured poetry in the last 2 years, but some say it may just be because she wrote songs in the folklore/evermore style. She has said she really enjoys writing in that style, and is definitely a possibility.
In the end, Woodvale is a confusing mess of a theory, we still don't know 100% anything about it, all we know from Taylor for a fact is that there were no Woodvale songs before Taylor's interview in 2022. The Anthology songs could be made based on folklore/evermore but it's unlikely we will ever get an answer about them being anything to do with Woodvale.
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What Taylor Swift said about it:
| “ | OK, well this takes a bit of explanation. 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 things in music videos or whatever. Then, sometimes I take it too far and I make a mistake. Basically, when I was making folklore, the album that came out back in July, I was too afraid to unveil the title of the album to even my closest teammates or management. | ” |
| “ | I didn’t tell anybody the album title until it came out. 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. Then decided, I don’t really want the title on the album covers. Then forgot to take the fake code name off of one. | ” |