Taylor Swift Files Trademark for Voice and Likeness Amid AI Concern
Taylor Swift knows the power of the Swifties all too well.
Though the “Shake It Off” singer is proud of the bond she shares with her fanbase, she also acknowledged that there’s times when their dedication gets a bit intense—particularly when it comes to analyzing who her songs are about.
“There's corners of my fanbase who are gonna take things to a really extreme place,” Taylor explained to The New York Times in an interview published on April 28. “There's nothing I can do about that. There's people who are gonna try to do detective work, figure out the details. ‘Who is that about? What is this?’”
“When it gets a little bit weird for me is when people act like it's a paternity test,” the 36-year-old continued. “Like, ‘This song's about that person.' Because I'm like, ‘That dude didn't write the song, I did.' But that's part of it.”
It’s no surprise that fans would try to dissect the lyrics of her love songs so carefully. After all, many of her hits are said to be inspired by her past romances with Jake Gyllenhaal, Joe Jonas, John Mayer, Harry Styles, Joe Alwyn, Matty Healy, and more.
And while the Grammy winner—who got engaged to NFL player Travis Kelce last August—knows she can’t prevent her fanbase from speculating about the inspiration behind her hits, she can control how she responds.
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“You have to hold tight to your perception of your art and your relationship with it,” Taylor explained. “And then you kind of have to [blow it away].”
“There it goes. Hope you like it,” she added. “And if you don't now, hope you do in five years, and if you never do, then I was doing it for me anyway.”
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Case in point? Channeling the backlash into her mega hits like “Blank Space” and “Anti-Hero.”
“Criticism has been a huge fuel for me,” she shared. “It's been a huge jumping-off point, like a creative writing prompt or something. There are so many songs in my career that would not exist, like ‘Blank Space’ would not exist if I hadn't had people be like, ‘Here's a slideshow of all her boyfriends.’”
“‘Anti-Hero’ is a song that I'm so proud of, still,” she added. “That song doesn't exist if I don't get criticized for every aspect of my personality that people you know have a problem with.”
For a look back at all the celebrities who inspired Taylor’s hit songs, keep reading…
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Travis Kelce
Before The Life of a Showgirl, the only track Taylor had certainly written about her guy on the Chiefs—save for The Eras Tour “Karma” rewrite, of course—is “So High School,” which the now-engaged couple aptly set their proposal Instagram post to in August 2025.
Although some fans speculate “The Alchemy,” also off The Tortured Poets Department, is about Travis for the football and high school metaphors sprinkled in the track, “So High School” includes a more obvious nod with the lyrics: “Are you going to marry, kiss or kill me? / It’s just a game but really / I’m betting on all three, for us two.”
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Indeed, Travis revealed to AfterBuzzTV back in 2016 that “Taylor Swift, would be the kiss,” in a game of “Marry, Kiss, Kill” between her, Ariana Grande and Katy Perry.
As for how Travis feels about the track? Although it’s a tough competition as a Swiftie, it’s his all-time favorite.
“I’m not gonna lie,” he joked of the choice to Access Hollywood in 2024. “I might be a little biased.”
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Matty Healy
Although short-lived, Taylor appeared to write several songs on The Tortured Poets Department about her dalliance with The 1975 frontman in 2023, including the album’s title track which also name drops their mutual pal and collaborator Jack Antonoff.
Other tracks rumored to be about Matty include “Fortnight,” “Down Bad,” and “But Daddy I Love Him,” the latter of which also appears to call out the backlash Taylor received for her relationship with him.
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And while Matty told paparazzi, per Entertainment Tonight in 2024 that he hadn’t listened to the album, though he was “sure it’s good,” his mother Denise Welch slammed his alleged connection to the breakup ballads.
“You’re not allowed to say anything,” the Loose Woman cohost said during a 2025 appearance on Watch What Happens Live, “and then she writes a whole album about it.”
For more on Matty’s place in Taylor’s catalogue, read here.
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Joe Alwyn
Amid their six-year relationship, Taylor penned several songs about—and with—the Conversations With Friends star. Shortly after the pair’s relationship was confirmed in 2016, she released Reputation, which included several songs about Joe such as “Call It What You Want,” “Dress,” and “King of My Heart.”
On Lover, Taylor also included the track “Cornelia Street,” a nod to the New York City rental she was living in during the early months of their romance. Elsewhere in her discography, fans believe Taylor also penned “invisible string,” on folklore about her romance with Joe, as well as Midnights’ “Sweet Nothing” and its bonus track “You’re Losing Me,” which her producer Jack confirmed was written two years before Taylor’s 2023 breakup with Joe.
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Joe is one of the many people in Taylor’s life who has also become her cowriter on songs, earning credits on folklore and evermore songs like “betty,” “champagne problems,” “exile” and others under the pseudonym William Bowery.
“It was really the most accidental thing to happen in lockdown,” the Brutalist alum told GQ of the cowriting credits in 2022. “It was just messing around on a piano and singing badly and being overheard and then thinking, you know, what if we tried to get to the end of it together?”
For more songs inspired by Joe, see here.
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Kanye West & Kim Kardashian
Following the infamous—and later revealed to be edited—phone call leak in 2016 between Kanye and Taylor over a reference he made to her on his The Life of Pablo album, Taylor has subtly clapped back at the former married couple more than once.
As recently as 2024, Taylor penned “thanK you aIMee” likely about Kim, given she capitalized letters in the track’s title to spell out her name. (In another variant of the TTPD album, she changed the letters to capitalize “YE” in the track, as an apparent nudge against the rapper.)
Prior to TTPD, Taylor also sprinkled hits against Kim and Kanye for the “Famous” feud, with “Mad Woman,” on folklore, where she sings, “Women like hunting witches too / Doing your dirtiest work for you / It’s obvious that wanting me dead has really brought you two together.”
Taylor’s her first Reputation single “Look What You Made Me Do,” was also a nod to the public fallout, as well as “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” in which she sings about a once-repaired friendship fracturing again.
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But, of course, Taylor’s musical inspirations from Kanye date back to that 2009 MTV VMA incident, when he interrupted her speech for Best Female Video at the Video Music Awards. In Speak Now’s “Innocent,” she forgives Kanye for the viral moment, which earned him backlash from figures as prominent as then-president Barack Obama.
“It’s OK / Life is a tough crowd,” Taylor sings on the track, going on to reference his age at the time of the VMAs. “32 and still growing up now / Who you are is not what you did / You’re still an innocent.”
For a thorough dive into Taylor’s beef with Kanye, see here.
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Calvin Harris & Tom Hiddleston
Taylor and the Loki actor may have only had a short-lived romance in the summer of 2016, but it did inspire more than one track for the “Karma” singer. Indeed, many fans speculated that “Getaway Car,” and “High Infidelity” are about their slightly overlapping romance with Taylor’s other ex Calvin Harris, with whom she split in June 2016 after one year of dating, the same month she sparked rumors with Tom.
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In both songs, Taylor sings about how a relationship born out of slight infidelity is doomed from the start.
While fans are sure these three are the ones who made up the “Getaway Car” sideshow, neither Taylor, nor Calvin or Tom have addressed the inspiration for the songs.
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Harry Styles
Although Taylor shut down any speculation that she wrote songs about her romance with the One Direction alum, there are a lot of subtle references to the “Watermelon Sugar” singer on 1989.
“Style,” is the most obvious song thought to be about Harry, simply for the song title, as well as “Out of the Woods,” and bonus track “Wonderland,” which references a “Cheshire cat smile”—which many fans see as a nod to Harry’s hometown Holmes Chapel in Cheshire, England.
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Meanwhile, the 1989 vault track “Is It Over Now?” paints a vivid picture of the moment Taylor knew her romance with Harry was over for good.
“Blue dress on a boat,” she sings in reference to the infamous January 2013 photo of her after the couple’s alleged breakup the Virgin Islands. “Your new girl is my clone.”
On “Now That We Don’t Talk,” she references the doomed vacation again, and slams Harry’s infamous music taste in the lines, “I don’t have to pretend I like acid rock / Or that I’d like to be on a mega-yacht.”
And while Taylor went on to date several more stars from across the pond, Harry was her first British bloke. And since London is referenced in other songs in her earlier catalogue, including Red’s “Come Back, Be Here” and “Message in a Bottle,” the tracks are also speculated to be about Harry.
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Katy Perry
Harry didn’t earn the entirety of 1989’s inspiration. Indeed, many fans believe the track “Bad Blood” is about Katy as Taylor teased to Rolling Stone in 2014 it was about another “female artist,” who “tried to sabotage an entire arena tour.”
“I was like, ‘Oh, we’re just straight-up enemies,’” Taylor, who at the time saw some of her background dancers leave for Katy’s Prismatic tour, added. “It wasn’t even about a guy! It had to do with business.”
However, Taylor maintained she penned the song simply to get some feelings off her chest.
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“My intent was not to create some gossip-fest,” she added to Rolling Stone. “I wanted people to apply it to a situation where they felt betrayed in their own lives.”
Ultimately, though, the song fueled a feud—with Katy posting on X one day after the Rolling Stone piece published, “Watch out for Regina George in sheep’s clothing.”
The singers were later able to squash their beef in 2019, after which Katy made a cameo in Taylor’s “You Need to Calm Down” music video.
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Ethel Kennedy & Robert Kennedy
Taylor can write fanfiction, too. Ahead of the release of Red, Taylor met Ethel while dating her grandson Conor Kennedy, and ultimately penned the song “Starlight” about a reimagined version of a date night between the Kennedy matriarch and her late husband.
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“Starlight is a song that I wrote after seeing a picture of Ethel and Bobby Kennedy when they were 17,” Taylor explained in a Red interview. “I didn’t know anything about what they were doing or what was going on in the picture, but I just thought ‘They look like they’re having the best night.’ And so I wrote this song about what the night might’ve been like.”
In response to the nod, Ethel told the Cape Cod Times, “She is just sensational, inside and out.”
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Jake Gyllenhaal
One of Taylor’s most popular breakup songs of all time “All Too Well”—and its 10-minute alternate version—is thought to be about the Donnie Darko star. After all, it references autumn—when their short-lived 2010 romance took place—her subject’s sister’s house, and a certain scarf. (Jake, of course, has a very famous sister in Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the duo passed a striped Gucci scarf between them during their romance.)
Taylor also appeared to take shots at her romance with Jake in “The Last Time,” “We Are Never Getting Back Together,” and the Red vault track “I Bet You Think About Me,” which call out the subject’s music taste and wealthy background.
Despite widespread belief Red as a whole was mostly inspired by Jake, he shut down any connection following the album’s 2021 rerelease.
“It’s about her relationship with her fans,” he told Esquire in 2022. “It is her expression.”
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Taylor, meanwhile, did concur with Jake's sentiment, noting that she saw "All Too Well" become something much deeper than a breakup song.
"What was so crazy is that when it went out into the world, the fans just among themselves decided it was their favorite too," she explained on Good Morning America in 2021. "They just sort of ... claimed it as the most important song from Red...over the course of the first six months the album was out."
Many fans speculate that The Tortured Poets Department's "The Manuscript" is about the impact of "All Too Well," and thus, Taylor's relationship with Jake.
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John Mayer
Yes, at least half of Taylor’s heart—at least at 19—once belonged to the “Gravity” musician, and it possibly inspired some of her Speak Now tracks like “Dear John,” and “The Story of Us,” which Taylor previously revealed were inspired by the same person.
“'The Story of Us' is about running into someone I had been in a relationship with at an awards show, and we were seated a few seats away from each other," she told USA Today in 2010. "I just wanted to say to him, 'Is this killing you? Because it's killing me.' But I didn't. Because I couldn't. Because we both had these silent shields up.”
While Taylor has more recently said she doesn’t use Easter eggs to hint at her personal life, the liner notes—where Taylor used to write secret messages for her fans—for the lyrics for “Story of Us” on the original Speak Now album spelled out “CMT Awards,” which she and John both attended in 2010.
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As for where “Dear John” is concerned? John himself had to respond to the brazen shots fired.
“I didn’t deserve it,” the musician told Rolling Stone in 2012. “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.”
Meanwhile, Taylor may have been too young to choose the high road as a teenager, but now she’s far too old for the drama. “I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19,” she told fans ahead of playing “Dear John,” at The Eras Tour in 2023. “Except for the songs that I wrote and the memories we made together.”
As she put it, “I do not care. We’ve all grown up. We’re good.”
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Taylor Lautner
Following a 2009 romance with the Twilight star, Taylor penned “Back to December” about the relationship. In addition to alluding to a “September night” where her subject saw her cry (Lautner was also at the 2009 VMAs), she included a nod to him in the song’s liner notes, which read, “Tay.”
Ahead of Speak Now’s rerelease in 2023, the Sharkboy and Lava Girl alum joked about his role in the album’s songs, telling Today at the time, “I feel safe.”
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Some fans also speculate that “Today Was a Fairytale” and “I Can See You”—of which the music video he starred in—were about her Valentine’s Day costar as well, as in the latter track, Taylor sings about keeping “everything professional,” before a romance ensued.
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Adam Young
Believe it or not, Taylor once got butterflies from the “Fireflies” singer. “Enchanted” is about a night she met the frontman for Owl City, and she revealed she included the line “wonderstruck” so he’d know it was about him, as he had used the word in an email to her.
“Meeting him,” Taylor told Yahoo in 2010. “It was this overwhelming feeling of: I really hope that you’re not in love with somebody.”
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A year later, Adam responded to the musical love letter by rerecording the song, adding in his own lyrics, “Oh Taylor, I was so enchanted to meet you too.”
“I’ll be the first to admit I’m a rather shy boy and since music is the most eloquent form of communication I can muster, I decided to record something for you–a sort of a ‘reply’ to the breathtaking song on your current record,” he added in a note beneath the song, shared to his band’s website at the time. “You are a true princess from a dreamy fairy tale.”
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Joe Jonas
Once upon a time, Taylor was extremely up front when it came to who inspired her songs, especially where her breakup with Joe Jonas is concerned. Back in 2008, she quickly penned “Forever and Always” and tacked it on as a last-minute addition to Fearless, perfectly timed to her infamous appearance on Ellen, where she called out the Jonas Brothers member for breaking up with her in a 25 to 27-second phone call.
On her next album, Speak Now, released in 2010, Taylor included two nods to Joe, including “Last Kiss,” a heart-wrenching ballad which references July 9, a.k.a. the date of the 2008 Jonas Brothers concert she attended while she and Joe were still together.
Elsewhere on the album, Taylor included “Better Than Revenge,” which was a clap back at the Jonas Brothers’ song “Much Better,” which had a not so veiled reference to her in the lyric, “I’m done with superstars and all the tears on her guitar.”
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Later on in her discography, Taylor included fonder nods to her past romance with Joe on Red’s “Holy Ground,” and folklore’s “Invisible String,” the latter in which she reflects on becoming friendly with him in more recent years. “Cold was the steel of my axe to grind for the boys who broke my heart,” she sings in the song, “Now I send their babies presents.”
However, when Taylor released Fearless (Taylor’s Version), she gave Joe one more whack with “Mr. Perfectly Fine” in 2021, though she penned the song around the time of their 2008 breakup. It was Joe’s now-ex-wife Sophie Turner who seemingly confirmed the track was about her then-husband, sharing the song to social media at the time and joking, “It’s NOT a bop.”
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