Taylor Swift‘s “Dear John” is now a topic of conversation after the release of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), so, who is it really about?
Taylor Swift has just released her third re-recorded album, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). In case you weren’t up to date as to why she’s re-recording her first six albums, we’ve got you.
Taylor wrote most of the lyrics and music for all her music and, five years ago, Scott Borchetta sold her entire discography to Scooter Braun, without giving her a chance to purchase it and own her music. So, she decided to do something about it and went into the studio. If you see a Taylor Swift album with Taylor’s Version in the brackets, it means she owns it.’
The first one she re-released was Fearless, followed by fan-favorite Red. Now, it’s Speak Now’s turn, and with that, a lot of controversy will come out, despite Taylor’s warnings.
Speak Now was the first album Taylor fully wrote herself, and she couldn’t be prouder she owns it. On social media, she wrote, “It’s here. It’s yours, it’s mine, it’s ours. It’s an album I wrote alone about the whims, fantasies, heartaches, dramas and tragedies I lived out as a young woman between 18 and 20. I remember making tracklist after tracklist, obsessing over the right way to tell the story.”
So, between battling dragons and moving mountains, there are some artists fans will be talking about.
Who is “Dear John” about?
Taylor Swift’s “Dear John” is track five on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), and longtime fans know what that means. It’s the song with the most emotional impact for Taylor, and usually the most heartbreaking.
It’s also the only song that refers to a person by name: John Mayer. Of course, she will never fully confirm it, but it’s as close to a confirmation that we got.
Mayer and Taylor briefly dated prior to the release of her third studio album, “Speak Now,” in 2010 when he was 32 and she was 19.
It all started in March 2009 when Mayer tweeted that he wanted to collaborate with Swift: “Waking up to this song idea that won’t leave my head. 3 days straight now. That means it’s good enough to finish. It’s called ‘Half of My Heart’ and I want to sing it with Taylor Swift,” he wrote at the time. “She would make a killer ‘Nicks’ in contrast to my ‘Petty’ of a song,” he added, referring to Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty.
Two months later, they performed together for the first time during her Fearless Tour stop in Los Angeles, singing “White Horse” and John’s “Your Body Is Wonderland.”
In November 2009, their collaboration was a reality: the duo dropped “Half of My Heart” on his album “Battle Studies.” That would be their only song together.
The two were seen out for dinner in late January 2010. Mayer also honored her at the June 2010 Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony.
Shortly after, in October 2010, she seems to have dragged him in “Dear John” on her third studio album. He told Rolling Stone two years later that the lyrics made him “feel terrible.” He added, “I’m pretty good at taking accountability now, and I never did anything to deserve that. It was a really lousy thing for her to do.”
Mayer also referred to the over six-minute long track as “cheap songwriting.”
In June 2013, Mayer released a breakup ballad titled “Paper Doll,” which fans speculated was his response to “Dear John.”
However, in a 2019 Instagram comment, he answered to a fan who asked “what song have you written that didn’t get the love it deserved?” Mayer responded, “When ‘Paper Doll’ came out, 100 percent of the people believed it was about somebody and the person that they thought it was about brought a certain amount of a superficial pop culture back and forth about it that I think kind of shat on the song.”
“But the song is not about that person,” he continued. “And I could never tell anybody that’s not true because then I would be breaking my rule that songwriters don’t say who the songs are about or not.”
What Did Taylor Say About It?
Before performing “Dear John” as a surprise song during her The Eras Tour at the Minneapolis US Bank Stadium.
“I’m 33 years old, I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19 except the songs I wrote,” the GRAMMY winner shared. “So what I’m trying to tell you is that I’m not putting this album out so that you could go and should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written the song about 14 billion years ago.“
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