When Taylor Swift released her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, back in April, one of the biggest surprises was just how many of the songs appear to be about her former flame Matty Healy.
The star famously embarked on a highly controversial romance with Matty throughout the month of May in 2023, with the two going public with their relationship less than one month after Taylor split from her boyfriend of over six years, Joe Alwyn.
Taylor’s association with Matty sparked almost immediate backlash due to Matty’s long history of problematic behavior, which included him seemingly doing a Nazi salute on stage, and candidly saying that he masturbates to Black women being “brutalized” just months earlier.
But Taylor remained defiant amid the outrage, and even made a pointed speech that implied she was completely unfazed by the online discourse during one of her Eras shows. However, in early June, it was reported that Taylor and Matty had ended their relationship — seemingly as suddenly as it had started.
Fast-forward to April, and Taylor’s fans were stunned by the sheer amount of insight that her 31-track album appeared to give into her and Matty’s relationship.
(At this point, it’s worth mentioning that lyrical interpretation is, of course, entirely subjective, and Taylor very rarely confirms who her songs are about. However, she has always actively encouraged her fans to connect clues and Easter eggs about the subjects of her music.)
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Through multiple songs, listeners are seemingly able to piece together a cohesive breakdown of what happened between the two stars; from the moment Taylor apparently left Joe for Matty, to her devastated and heartbroken reaction to him ultimately ghosting her.
Taylor’s music also appears to confirm long-running speculation that she and Matty had been privately involved in an on-again, off-again situationship of sorts for almost a decade, with the two first being romantically linked in November 2014 before Matty shut the rumors down by saying that it’d be “emasculating” to date her.
On Tortured Poets, Taylor makes several references to “waltzing back into rekindled flames” and being “haunted” by somebody and a relationship that they “never quite buried” in songs that are widely believed to be about Matty.
And just how besotted she was with Matty is also evident in multiple tracks, with the star admitting that she was “heaven-struck” by him — and even fantasized about them getting married and having children together.
In fact, Taylor was seemingly so devoted to the British singer despite his many controversies that she even dedicated one of her songs to calling out the fans who questioned their relationship in her defiant anthem “But Daddy I Love Him.”
Here, she calls the relationship critics “saboteurs,” “judgmental creeps,” and “vipers dressed in empath’s clothing” as she doubles down in spectacular fashion — accusing the cynics of trying to “cage” her and hold her back from her “destiny.”
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Despite all of this, Taylor seemingly goes on to confirm speculation that Matty had brutally ghosted her in her song “The Smallest Man That Ever Lived,” where she sings: “You tried to buy some pills from a friend of friends of mine / They just ghosted you, now you know what it feels like.”
This idea is echoed in “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” where Taylor confesses: “I’m so obsessed with him, but he avoids me like the plague.”
And the star does not hold back in sharing her heartache, with it arguably evident that Taylor was left absolutely devastated by Matty’s actions. She tries to make sense of the whole thing in “The Black Dog,” where she asks: “Do you hate me? Was it hazing for a cruel fraternity?” In “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” she adds: “Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead? Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed? Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy? In fifty years, will all this be declassified, and you’ll confess why you did it?”
And in “Down Bad,” she repeats: “Now I’m down bad, crying at the gym / Everything comes out teenage petulance: ‘Fuck it if I can’t have him, I might just die it would make no difference,’” she sings. “Fuck it, if I can’t have us, I might just not get up.”
Taylor’s heartbreak is arguably at its most exposed in “loml,” where she acknowledges: “You’re the loss of my life.”
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Despite just how much Taylor had seemingly exposed about both him and their relationship on the album, Matty did not react to the discourse following its release.
When paparazzi approached him to ask how he felt about his ex’s “diss track,” Matty nonchalantly replied: “My diss track? Oh! I haven’t really listened to that much of it, but I’m sure it’s pretty good.”
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And in a new appearance on the Doomscroll podcast, Matty seemingly dismissed Taylor as a casual romantic liaison as he insisted that he will not be following her lead and writing songs about his version of events.
Admitting that he “used to write about relationships a lot more,” Matty went on to call out the artists who are more focused on their “lore” than the art that they create.
Referencing his and Taylor’s relationship, Matty began: “Last year I became a way more well-known public figure for loads of different reasons. The only reason that I was interested in is kind of like, what I was doing.”
“I think that a lot of artists, they become very interested in their lore, or they become interested in the things that have happened outside of their art that people know about and they want to address that, and fair enough,” he added.
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“Honestly, I would kind of just be lying if I made a record about, I don’t know, all the stuff that was said about me or my casual romantic liaisons — or whatever it may be that I’ve kind of become known for just because I was famous,” Matty went on.
“That’s an obvious thing to draw from, and I’m just not interested in [it],” he concluded. “The idea of making a record about something that personally happened to me, that by the time I put it out is gonna be like two years old… I see people doing that as well, and it’s not interesting.”
