Did Taylor Swift Write Half an Album About the 1975's Matty Healy?

Taylor Swift, who surprised the entire planet with a double album release of The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, has handed over the storyline to her fans, who have bookmarked former flame Matt Healy as a primary lyrical inspiration.

Swift Nation took to all social media outlets ahead of the release, deducing that several passages pointed in Healy's direction. The title track makes reference, not too subtly, at a few Healy knowns:

"You smokеd then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever"

While Puth could be gleefully fist-pumping the air at a Swift mention, the snarky mention of chocolate is a direct reference to the 1975's song of the same name from their 2013 debut album. The tattoo callout is pretty obvious, even with a surface perusal including this quote next to a sad balloon: "I have killed him for you and I’ve brought him to you as a reminder of our own inevitable slip into the great nothing."

Never miss a story — sign up for the Q newsletter for the latest music news on all your favorite artists, all in one place.

And what would a Swift lyric mention be without a nod to Boygenius?

"Sometimes, I wonder if you're gonna screw this up with me / But you told Lucy you'd kill yourself if I ever leave / And I had said that to Jack about you, so I felt seen / Everyone we know understands why it's meant to be / 'Cause we're crazy."

The Lucy is of course Lucy Dacus, one of Swift's besties and one-third member of (the now on hiatus) Boygenius. Swift's longtime collaborator is Jack Antonoff and presumably through all this messy confessional we're now privy to how the inner circle reacted to the Swift-Healy pairing.

Healy had never been fully embraced by Swift's fans to start with, even though the pair had been publicly flirtatious as far back as 2014. Questioned by E! News back then if he would ever date her, he responded "I mean bloody hell, what am I going to do? Go out with Taylor Swift? She's a sensation, I wouldn't say no."

Healy then found himself in hot water when he was interviewed for Q in 2016 and claimed later that his words were taken out of context. From that cover story in October, Healy said it would've been "emasculating" for him to date Swift, with whom he had a "flirtation."

"I don't do anything else, right, so it doesn't leave a lot of room for me going out, or shagging someone. So, the one time I did have a flirtation with a girl it ends up going everywhere…. I mean, I got on E! News and people were like, 'Who's Matt Healy?' so that was cool, but I didn't make a big deal out of it myself.

"It's not really anything to talk about, because if she wasn't Taylor Swift we wouldn't be talking about her," he continued. "She wasn't a big impact on my life. It's just interesting to me how interested the world is about Taylor Swift."

He added, "If I had gone out with Taylor Swift I would've been, 'F--king hell! I am not being Taylor Swift's boyfriend.' You know, 'F--k that.' That's also a man thing, a de-masculinating, emasculating thing."

As regards to their brief reunion in 2023, well here's what Swift has to say in the song "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived:"

"Was any of it true? / Gazing at me starry-eyed / In your Jehovah’s Witness suit."

And by the way, no official response – yet – from Healy.