Taylor Swift Clarifies Meaning Behind New Songs As Fans Are Convinced She Wrote About Matty Healy
Taylor Swift’s new albums, The Tortured Poets Department and The Anthology, include an incredibly varied array of songs, and swifties had a ball listening to the records and trying to decode the meaning behind the lyrics.
A lot of songs talked about heartbreak, as was expected, considering that just a year ago Taylor ended her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn.
However, as they listened and analyzed the songs, fans concluded that, in a lot of songs, she was actually referring to her short-lived relationship with Matty Healy, which a lot of fans considered to be unhealthy.
The pop star decided to open up about the meaning of her lyrics on Amazon Music’s Taylor Swift Track by Track special.
Taylor Swift Explained The Meaning Of Her New Songs
Taylor Swift recently dove into the meaning behind her new songs and mentioned a few of them being about toxic relationships, seemingly confirming swifties’ suspicions about who she was referring to.
About the song “Down Bad”, she said it was about “the idea of being love bombed where someone, you know, rocks your world and dazzles you then kind of abandons you as an alien abduction where this girl was abducted by aliens but she wanted to stay with them and then when they like drop her off back in her hometown she’s like, ‘Where are you going? I liked it there, it was weird but it was cool, come back!’”
“The character in the song just felt like, ‘I’ve just been exposed to a whole different galaxy and universe I didn’t know was possible, how can you put me somewhere I was before?’” She continued.
The title “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” is pretty intense, and the meaning behind it is even more heartbreaking. She explained it’s about “being somebody’s favorite toy until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore — which is how a lot of us are in relationships where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of the sudden, they break us or they devalue us in their mind.”
“We’re still clinging on to ‘No no, no. You should’ve seen them the first time they saw me. They’ll come back to that. They’ll get back to that,’” she added. “So it’s kind of like a song about denial, really, so that you can live in this world where there’s still hope for a toxic broken relationship.”
The Songs Also Talked About Women In The Entertainment Industry
Taylor Swift also spoke in depth about the role of women in the entertainment industry, and how they’re pitted against each other from the very beginning. Her song “Clara Bow”, of course, references the famous actress, and Taylor called it “a commentary on what I’ve seen in the industry that I’ve been in over time.”
“I used to sit in record labels trying to get a record deal when I was a little kid,” she shared, “and they’d say, ‘You know, you remind us of…’ and then they’d name an artist, and then they’d kind of say something disparaging about her, ‘But you’re this, you’re so much better in this way or that way.’ And that’s how we teach women to see themselves, as, like, ‘You could be the new replacement for this woman who’s done something great before you.’”
She also name-dropped Stevie Nicks in the song, addressing the similarities people point out between the two singers, calling the Fleetwood Mac leader “an icon and an incredible example for anyone who wants to write songs and make music.”
As fans can see, while heartbreak was certainly an important topic in Taylor Swift’s new music, her songs are about so much more than that.
