Listen up, Taylor Swift fans!
As the 33-year-old pop star prepares to release the re-recording of Speak Now on July 7, she has a message for fans about online harassment. You see, Swift’s music inspires a lot of passionate support from fans—sometimes at the expense of the songs’ alleged subjects. For example, Jake Gyllenhaal, who dated Swift when she was 20 and he was 29, received a wave of backlash following the release of “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” which appeared on the re-recording of Red in 2021.
“It is her expression. Artists tap into personal experiences for inspiration, and I don’t begrudge anyone that,” Gyllenhaal responded in an interview with Esquire in February 2022. “At some point, I think it’s important when supporters get unruly that we feel a responsibility to have them be civil and not allow for cyberbullying in one’s name. That begs for a deeper philosophical question. Not about any individual, per se, but a conversation that allows us to examine how we can—or should, even—take responsibility for what we put into the world, our contributions into the world. How do we provoke a conversation?”
It seems Taylor Swift has found a way. Prior to singing “Dear John” as an Eras Tour surprise song in Minneapolis on June 24, she asked that the “kindness” and “gentleness” at the core of her fandom be extended to the person “you think I wrote a song about 14 million years ago.” In the case of “Dear John,” that person is believed to be John Mayer, who dated the singer from 2009 to 2010 when he was 31 and she was 19 years old.
“I was hoping to ask you, that as we lead up to this album coming out, I would love for that kindness and that gentleness to extend onto our internet activities,” Swift said, per fan-recorded videos from the show. “So what I’m trying to say is, I’m putting this album out because I want to own my music and I believe that any artist who has the desire to own their music should be able to. That’s why I’m putting out this album.”
She continued, “I’m 33 years old, I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19 except the songs I wrote and the memories we made together. So what I’m trying to tell you, is that I am not putting this album out so you should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I wrote a song about 14 million years ago when I was 19.”
