She never said his name, but Taylor Swift asked fans not to attack ex-boyfriend John Mayer when she releases her version of the album Speak Now—which contains the song “Dear John”—next month.
“I’m 33 years old. I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19,” she said during a concert in Minneapolis on Saturday night.
“I’m not putting this album out so that you can go and should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written a song about 14 billion years ago.”
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Swift was 19 when she briefly dated Mayer, who was 12 years older than her—and fans have long been convinced the scorching track is about him and their breakup.
“Don’t you think I was too young?” she sings. “You should’ve known.”
In seeming confirmation, that her plea for “kindness” and the tune are about Mayer, she broke an 11-year drought and played “Dear John” for the Minneapolis crowd.
Mayer has slammed Swift for the song, telling Rolling Stone a decade ago that he didn’t “deserve it.”
“I’m pretty good at taking accountability now, and I never did anything to deserve that,” he said. “It was a really lousy thing for her to do.”
Swifties have been slow to forgive Mayer. Last year, they mobilized when he was announced as a guest on the Call Her Daddy podcast, hosted by fellow Taylor fan Alex Cooper.
When Cooper asked Mayer about his “fuckboy,” reputation, the Grammy winner steered clear of mentioning Swift.
“That’s the role I play on the big TV show I didn’t write, but that’s fine. Maybe I had a hand in it or something,” he said.
Swift is releasing her own version of Speak Now as part of a continuing effort to reclaim control of her music that began when Scooter Braun bought her old label and the masters of her original albums.
