John Mayer has feelings, too, even if he did act like a lout. The singer/songwriter says he felt like he was kicked while he was down by Taylor Swift’s song “Dear John!” He called the tune humiliating.
The song was probably the biggest breakup song of the year when Swift released it on her 2010 album Speak Now.
The country queen is known for using ex-relationships as fodder for her songs, but Mayer called the tune “cheap songwriting.”
“It made me feel terrible,” he tells 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 added.
Swift and Mayer were romantically linked before the song’s release. Tabloids reported at the time that Swift was seen sitting on his lap with her arms around his neck, and a source claimed she spent the night in his hotel suite.
Did he make her a one-night stand? It sure sounds like it judging from the lyrics.
“Don’t you think I was too young
To be messed with
The girl in the dress
Cried the whole way home
Dear John, I see it all, now it was wrong
Don’t you think nineteen is too young
To be played by your dark twisted games, when I loved you so?
I should’ve known”
They reportedly split five months before the album came out.
Mayer ducked out of the public’s eye for almost two years following release of the song and devastating interviews in Rolling Stone and Playboy.
“I never got a phone call,” Mayer says about Swift’s intentions. “I was really caught off-guard, and it really humiliated me at a time when I’d already been dressed down.
“I mean, how would you feel if, at the lowest you’ve ever been, someone kicked you even lower?” When asked about the song’s lyric, “Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?” John says, “I don’t want to go into that.”
Check out the tune below:
Keith Girard four decades of experience as an award-winning reporter, editor-in-chief, and senior media executive. Keith’s career began in Washington, D.C., where he was a reporter for The Washington Post and a contributing editor for Regardie’s and Washingtonian magazines. He also worked as a writer/producer in CNN’s Washington Bureau and has written one book on the U.S. Marines in the Gulf War.
Hang on here. At only 20 years old she outlined an awful big number of relationships on that album for someone who tells her fans she stays home and bakes cookies! He may have been a jerk, but isn’t this a man who took responsibility for his actions, who took himself out of the destructive environment and mindset he was in, and who has a right to explain his own feelings given that there are so many people in this world who feel they are qualified to judge him, and to hold things against him that are NONE of their business?
Fact is, if she hadn’t been so young and inexperienced, she probably would have called him and told him about her feelings and problems with his behavior. But she was too young and inexperienced to even see that she was young and experienced. So instead she chose to complain about him very publicly in a song. THAT is what he is calling cheap, not her skills as a song-writer. Listen to her song – SHE says she stopped taking his calls. He probably didn’t know!