After months of speculation, Taylor Swift fans finally have confirmation on which “Lucy” Swift is singing about on the title track of “The Tortured Poets Department:” singer-songwriter and Boygenius member Lucy Dacus.
On “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift sings: “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”
It didn’t take long for fans to deduce that “Jack” was Swift’s frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff, but the identity of the “Lucy” mentioned in the verse remained unspecified until Dacus set the record straight in an interview with People.
“I think it’s fair game to say ‘yes,’ she actually texted me and asked for my approval,” Dacus said. “I pushed play on the album just like, ‘Oh, this is so crazy,’” she continued. “This is the first Taylor record to come out since meeting her, and listening to a friend’s record feels so much different than a stranger’s record.”
As for the love interest in the song who told Dacus they’d “kill themselves” if Swift left, fans speculate that Swift and Dacus’ mutual friend Matty Healy is the main inspiration for much of “The Tortured Poets Department.”
Swift and Healy (who fronts the British pop band The 1975) met in November 2014 but didn’t officially get together until May 2023. The pair’s brief but highly publicized relationship included frequent concert appearances at each other’s shows, but Swift and Healy called it quits just one month after they got together.
From Variety US