Art imitating life? Taylor Swift has a knack for writing about the upsAnd downs of falling in love — and with exes like Joe Jonas, John Mayer, Harry Styles, Tom Hiddleston and Calvin HarrisShe is full of inspiration.
The performer previously admitted that she received many responses from ex-boyfriends regarding her music. While discussing the 2012 song “All Too Well,” which is based on her short-lived romance with Jake GyllenhaalSwift revealed that Swift had spoken with her ex-fiancé about the breakup track.
“He was like, ‘I just listened to the album, and that was a really bittersweet experience for me. It was like going through a photo album.’ That was nice,” she recalled to New York magazine2013. “Nicer than, like, the ranting, crazy e-mails I got from this one dude. It’s a lot more mature way of looking at a love that was wonderful until it was terrible, and both people got hurt from it — but one of those people happened to be a songwriter. What are you going do? Before you called me up, didn’t you Wikipedia me? [for a date]?”
During her Reputation concert special, which dropped on Netflix in 2018, the Pennsylvania native noted that her writing process is “usually me just trying to get past something and understand something I’m going through by writing about it.” At the time, Swift also reflected on how her relationship with “All Too Well” has changed since its debut years prior.
“There’s the life of this song, where this song was born out of catharsis and venting and trying to get over something and trying to understand it and process it. Then there’s the life where it went out to the world and you turned it into something completely different for me,” she said to fans at the time. “You turned this song into a collage of memories of watching you scream the words to this song or seeing pictures that you post to me of you having written the words of the song in your diary or you showing me your wrist and you have a tattoo of the lyrics to this song underneath your skin and that is how you changed the song ‘All Too Well’ [for] me.”
However, not all of her hits are breakup songs. After sparking her relationship with Joe AlwynThe songwriter discovered a musical connection with the actor in 2017.
“Joe and I really love sad songs. We’ve always bonded over music. … We write the saddest. We love sad songs. What can I say?” Swift told Zane LoweAfter the couple had collaborated on her, he will be on Apple Music in December 2020 Folklore album. “And I say it was a surprise that we started writing together, but in a way, it wasn’t because we have always bonded over music and had the same musical tastes. And he’s always the person who’s showing me songs by artists and then they become my favorite songs.”
Scroll down to find out which celebrities Taylor Swift is singing about in hit songs like “Bad Blood,” “Dear John,” “Red” and “Look What You Made Me Do”:
