Taylor Swift has branded her fans a “little weird” for using “detective work” to figure out who she writes about in her songs.
The Life Of A Showgirl star is famous for using her personal life as inspiration for her tracks and her devoted followers spend a lot of time trying to unpick her lyrics in a bid to work out who each song is about – and Taylor Swift has admitted it feels like a “paternity test”.
In an interview with New York Magazine, she explained: “There’s corners of my fanbase that are going to take things to a really extreme place.
“There’s nothing that I can do about that. There’s people who are going to try to like, do detective work, figure out the details – who is that about? What is this?
“When it gets a little bit weird for me is when people act like it’s sort of like a paternity test. Like: ‘This song’s about this person.’ Because I’m like: ‘That dude didn’t write the song. I did’.”
However, Taylor Swift is adamant she doesn’t let others’ “perception” of her work influence her. She add: “You have to hold tight to your perception of your art and your relationship with it, and then you just have to [think]: ‘There it goes, hope you like it! If you don’t now, hope you do in five years! And if you never do, then I was doing it for me anyway’.”
In the interview, Taylor Swift went on to reveal her hit track Love Story – which was released in 2008 – was one of the first tracks she wrote without worrying about what other people thought of it – revealing she penned the song when she was 17 and angry with her parents because they refused to let her date an older boy.
She also revealed her real life is still influencing her writing as one of her most recent tracks, Elizabeth Taylor from The Life of A Showgirl, came to fruition following a passionate rant about her admiration for the late actress during a car journey with her fiance Travis Kelce.
The singer revealed the tune popped into her head as soon as she got out of the car and she was “scrambling” to record the melody on her phone before she forgot it.