And he said speak now! Taylor Lautner joked about the upcoming re-release of ex Taylor Swift’s Speak Now record — which notably contains a fan favorite song about their relationship.
“I think it’s a great album. Yeah, I feel safe,” the Twilight star, 31, quipped to Today.com on Tuesday, May 16, about Swift, 33, dropping Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) in July.
While Lautner is prepared for the newfound interest in the exes’ three-month relationship that took place in 2009, he noted that one of Swift’s exes may not get away scot-free. “Praying for John [Mayer],” he quipped.
The “Anti-Hero” musician’s Speak Now album – which dropped in 2010 — famously features one track about her romance with Lautner (“Back to December”) and another seemingly about her past relationship with Mayer, now 45 (“Dear John”).
While the lyrics about Lautner are easy enough to decode — plus, the secret message hidden in the liner notes of “Back to December” spell out “TAY” — the Abduction star confirmed that the track was about him during a conversation with Lea Michele in 2016.
Swift, for her part, told USA Today of the apologetic track: “It is a song and a conversation that needed to happen because I don’t want to hurt people. If you unintentionally do so, you’ve got to make that better,” she explained upon its release.
While the “Love Story” artist sang her apologies to Lautner on “Back to December” — “So this is me swallowing my pride / Standing in front of you saying I’m sorry for that night / And I go back to December all the time,” she croons on the chorus — “Dear John” was a much angrier track.
Although Swift has never confirmed that her track was about the Room for Squares artist, fans have long believed she is referring to Mayer in the song, which appears to reference Swift’s age — and their age gap.
“Dear John, I see it all, now it was wrong / Don’t you think 19 is too young / To be played by your dark twisted games, when I loved you so? I should’ve known,” she sings on the bridge. (Swift was 19 when she briefly dated Mayer in 2009. He was 32 at the time.)
In a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, the “Gravity” singer called the idea of Swift penning the track a “lousy thing to do.”
“I will say as a songwriter that I think it’s kind of cheap songwriting. I know she’s the biggest thing in the world, and I’m not trying to sink anybody’s ship, but I think it’s abusing your talent to rub your hands together and go, ‘Wait till he gets a load of this!’” Mayer said at the time. “That’s bulls—.” (Swift, for her part, told Glamour in 2012 that Mayer was “presumptuous” to assume the track was about him.)
He, in turn, allegedly wrote his 2013 song “Paper Doll” about Swift.
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Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) will be released on Friday, July 7.
