Taylor Swift has revealed that Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff’s relationship inspired ‘1989’ song ‘You Are In Love’.
Interviewed by Rookie founder Tavi Gevinson for Elle magazine’s “Women In Music” issue, Swift explained that she wrote the song after the Girls creator and star opened up about her relationship with the Bleachers singer.
Asked by Gevinson about the ‘You Are In Love’ lyric “You’re my best friend”, Swift replied: “I’ve never had that, so I wrote that song about things that Lena [Dunham] has told me about her and Jack [Antonoff]. That’s just basically stuff she’s told me. And I think that that kind of relationship — God, it sounds like it would just be so beautiful — would also be hard. It would also be mundane at times.”
Elsewhere in the interview, which won’t appear in full until the issue’s release on May 19, Swift opened up about relationships and life in the public eye.
Speaking about recovering from an unspecified breakup, she said: “I’d been in this media hailstorm of people having a very misconstrued perception of who I was. There were really insensitive jokes being made at awards shows by hosts; there were snarky headlines in the press—‘Taylor Goes Through a Breakup: Well, That Was Swift!’—focusing on all the wrong things.”
Discussing her approach to writing love songs, she added: “Once I fell in love, or thought I was in love, and then experienced disappointment or it just not working out a few times, I realized there’s this idea of happily ever after which in real life doesn’t happen. There’s no riding off into the sunset, because the camera always keeps rolling in real life. It’s magical if you ask anyone who has ever fallen in love—it’s the greatest. Now I have more of a grasp on the fact that when you’re in a state of infatuation and you think everything that person does is perfect, it then — if you’re lucky — morphs into a real relationship when you see that that person is not in fact perfect, but you still want to see them every day.”
Meanwhile, Swift recently spoke about her rumoured Kanye West collaboration.
Having been photographed together at the Grammy Awards, West stated in an interview back in February that he and Swift would be “going into the studio together”, but now, speaking to ET, Swift has described the team-up as still in its infancy.
[Kanye] has said that [we’ve been collaborating],” Taylor said in the interview. “We’ve never been in a studio together, but he’s got a lot of amazing ideas.”
“He’s one of those people that’s just like idea, idea, idea,” she continued. “He’s very creative and… I think we’ve talked about it but we’ve also talked about so many other things… I completely respect him as a producer. So, that’s all I know now.”
Swift and West recently made amends following their infamous fall-out at the MTV VMAs in 2009, when West interrupted Swift’s acceptance speech to argue that the Best Video award should have gone to Beyoncé.