Supposedly it was a coincidence but some fans are sure Matty Healy was hinting at a song from Taylor Swift’s album The Tortured Poets Department.
Although fans previously had ample opportunity to discern that 35 -year-old Healy was largely responsible for the record, which was released in April, the 1975’s frontman unleashed a new meme-worthy line on Monday, November 18.
“If you don’t know this cover, you are welcome,” so wrote him in Instagram Stories sharing a link to Annie Lenox’s version of the Blue Nile’s ‘Downtown Lights’. The song is mentioned in the Tortured Poets Department song “Guilty as Sin?”
Talking about this sad relationship, Swift, 34, starts the song singing ‘Drowning in the Blue Nile, he sent me ‘Downtown Lights.’
Altho it might not be related, the fans quickly associated the lyrics of Taylor Swift to the video uploaded by Healy on Instagram.
“Guilty as Sin?” continues with sexual desire “without ever touching his skin” and asking if one is bad or mad or wise to have “fatal fantasies” about the man.
A few listeners thought it means that he was cheating on his partner emotionally, despite the fact that their own relationship was already burning. After breaking up with her boyfriend of six years Joe Alwyn in the spring of 2023, Swift was in a short relationship with Healy.
The lyrics of another song from TTPD, “Fresh Out The Slammer” is reminiscent of “prologue” where Swift seems to recollect of being away from partners who offered “silent dinners,” “gray and blue and fights and tunnels” while being with “someone that don’t understand” before “running back home” to another. Before the couple got together, rumors about their relationship started around 2014.
Like other songs in the TTPD album, “Guilty as Sin?” and “Fresh Out the Slammer” depict a person that gave Swift something to hope for when she was struggling with the break up of her relationship with Alwyn, most of the TTPD songs rumored to be about Healy are not quite as positive.
More bitterness can be felt in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”: “You hung me on your wall, stabbed me with your push pins In public, showed me off, then sank in stoned oblivion.”
According to a friend of his, who anonymously spoke to Us Weekly in June, Healy was “completely blindsided by the record’s lyrical content.”
“He loves everything which came with it, [but] he also thinks it’s funny because at no time [were they] serious,” the friend said.
“If I recorded all the things said about me or my one night stands or something as simple as that simply because I was famous, I think that is self explanatory.” ‘It’s just something I don’t really care about,’ he said in the episode of the ‘Doomscroll Podcast’ in October.
“So, the concept of a record about something that actually happened to me and then by the time I release it to the public, is history – I see artists doing that as well and it’s as boring as anything to me.”
