Taylor Swift has a pretty big reputation for taking her broken hearts (yes, plural) and turning them into super successful country-pop songs that the world will hear, but she says it’s hard for her to find out what certain people think about her.
When doing an interview for Glamour Magazine, Swift quickly shut down the interviewer’s segueway into how her ex, John Mayer, felt about her song “Dear John”, saying she doesn’t want to know what he thinks about her or the song.
“I know it wasn’t good, so I don’t want to know,” she said. “I put a high priority on staying happy, and I know what I can’t handle.” Besides, she said, she never discloses who her songs are about, so how does he even know he was the target?
Presumably because there are things in it that apply to him, and he’s feeling guilty. But Mayer has publicly spoken out against the song, saying he felt “humiliated” after he heard it and that he didn’t deserve it. Swift says she purposely stays away from reading, seeing, or hearing things about herself when it comes to hurt feelings, because she can only take so much.
“It’s not that I’m this egomaniac and I don’t want to hear anything negative,” she said. “Because I do keep myself in check. But I’ve never developed that thick a skin…If you go too far down the rabbit hole of what people think about you, it can change everything about who you are.”
The young singer has already left a long trail of boys who have done her wrong in the form of lyrics, and says that’s her way of coping rather than a mode of revenge. But when asked about her current beau, Conor Kennedy, Swift quickly closes up.
“I don’t talk about my personal life in great detail,” Swift said. “I write about it in my songs, and I feel like you can share enough about your life in your music to let people know what you’re going through.”