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Topics: Taylor Swift, Music
Joe Harker
Topics: Taylor Swift, Music
Taylor Swift's new album has just released and already the Swifties are searching for references to her past relationships.
Anyone listening to The Tortured Poets Department and wondering if they were going to hear a lyrical dissection of Swift's six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn instead seemed to get more material on her brief dalliance with Matty Healy, the frontman of The 1975.
Fans have been going through the Taylor Swift album to figure out whether The Tortured Poets Department is the lyrical equivalent of rolling a cannon right up to Matty Healy before blasting away.
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Announcing the album on social media, Swift wrote: "The Tortured Poets Department. An anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time - one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure.
"This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed.
"And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted.
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"This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.
"And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry."
That was essentially the cry of havoc and it has let slip the dogs of war, who are in this case Taylor Swift fans sifting through the lyrics of her latest songs for potential meanings.
One of their big clues is from the song 'Guilty as Sin', which opens with the lyrics: "Drowning in The Blue Nile, he sent me 'Downtown Lights'."
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The more musically versed of you might know that Matty Healy is a fan of Scottish band The Blue Nile, and 'The Downtown Lights' is one of their songs, so it's not hard to guess that the song is about him.
Elsewhere in the album, the song 'I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)' sings about a boyfriend who tells jokes that are 'revolting and far too loud' and despite the singer's repeated insistence that she can fix this man it ends with the line 'whoa, maybe I can't'.
Coincidentally, Matty Healy caused controversy while dating Swift for his offensive jokes about rapper Ice Spice, and has been accused of making racist comments.
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There's plenty of other clues which Taylor Swift's fans have been picking over elsewhere in the album.
"'The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived' is the most brutal song I've ever heard," one of her fans said, while another agreed that it was 'the most brutal song Taylor Swift has ever written'.
Today might also be a bad day for Kim Kardashian.
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On track 'thanK you aIMee' - the capital letters spell out KIM, you see - Swift sings about a fictional feud in her hometown.
The lyric "all that time you were throwin' punches, I was buildin' somethin" is thought by many to be a reference to the infamous controversy over Kanye West's track 'Famous', where Swift accused Kardashian of stitching her up.
Some of her other fans think there are parts of the album which might be about them.
Some of the listeners to 'But Daddy I Love Him' have been wondering if the lines 'God save the most judgmental creeps who say they want what's best for me' is really about some of her more parasocial fans.
Listeners said she was 'singing about hating cupcake swifties' and 'shaded everyone including swifties'.
The Tortured Poets Department is out now.