Do you know how hard it is to highlight Swift’s best breakup song when she is basically the godmother of breakup songs, knowing exactly which crumbs of info will turn her listeners into detectives? Her albums are her journals and her songs are her relationship guides. But her most obvious one was “Dear John” off of her 2010 album Speak Now.
Sample lyric? “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?”
It was, of course, about John Mayer, though Swift never confirmed it…but Mayer decided to a few years later, admitting in an interview that the song “humiliated.”
“It made me feel terrible,” Mayer told Rolling Stone. “Because I didn’t deserve it. I’m pretty good at taking accountability now, and I never did anything to deserve that. It was a really lousy thing for her to do.” He felt the move was “cheap songwriting” to, as he described it, “rub your hands together and go, ‘Wait till he gets a load of this!'”
Swift’s response? “How presumptuous!”