Taylor Swift clarified what the lyrics of “Actually Romantic” are really about, as fans speculated it was a diss track aimed at Charli XCX.
The pop superstar’s 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl, the first since her engagement to Travis Kelce and also the first since she revealed in May that she had regained control over her back catalogue, was released last week.
In the much-discussed and scrutinised track, Swift opens with the lyrics: “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave.”
She later sings: “High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me. Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face…”
While cryptic, fans believe that this is Swift’s rebuttal of Charli’s song “Sympathy is a Knife” from her critically acclaimed 2024 album Brat.
However, Swift has now clarified that the song is about a “one-sided, adversarial relationship”, in an audio breakdown of each song in her album for Amazon Music.
She described ‘Actually Romantic’ as “a song about realising that someone else has kind of had a one-sided, adversarial relationship with you that you didn’t know about. And all of a sudden they start doing too much and they start letting you know that actually, you’ve been living in their head rent-free and you had no idea.”
“It’s presenting itself as them sort of resenting you or having a problem with you but you take that and just accept it as love and you accept it as attention and affection, and how flattering that somebody has made you such a big part of their reality when you didn’t even think about this.
“It’s actually pretty romantic if you really think about it.”
Swift also talked about the song and its lyrics in a limited-run film that was released in theatres on Friday as a companion piece to The Life of a Showgirl. The film has already shot to No 1 at the global box office with an estimated $46m collection over the weekend, reported Variety.
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The film featured the world premiere of the music video for the single “The Fate Of Ophelia”, as well as behind-the-scenes footage, lyric videos from the album and “cut-by-cut explanations” of what inspired the music.
Describing the song, she said, according to the BBC: “There can be this moment where it’s unveiled to you, through things that they do that are very overt.”
“And, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve just started to be like, ‘Oh my God, you did so much with this.’ It’s flattering. That is, ‘Wow, that is very, very sweet of you to think about me this much, even if it’s negative.’ In my industry, attention is affection, and you’ve given me a whole lot of it.”
In Charli’s song “Sympathy is a Knife,” she sings: “Don’t know if I’m spiralling. One voice tells me that they laugh. George says I’m just paranoid. Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show. Fingers crossed behind my back. I hope they break up real quick”.
The George referenced in the song is Charli’s now-husband, George Daniel, who is the drummer in indie-pop band The 1975. In 2023, Swift had a brief but much-publicised relationship with the group’s frontman Matty Healy, who fans think was referenced numerous times on her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department.
Charli has not responded to the rumours of “Actually Romantic” being about her, but it should be noted that both her and Swift have publicly complimented each other in recent years.
In June 2024, the British pop star hit back at fans in Brazil who chanted “Taylor Swift is dead” during one of her concerts. Reacting to the fans’ behaviour, Charli shared a message on social media, posted over a screengrab of a video alerting her to the distasteful chant.
“Can the people who do this please stop,” she wrote on her Instagram story. “Online or at my shows. It is the opposite of what I want and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community. I will not tolerate it.”
Meanwhile, in August 2024, Swift heaped praise on Charli during an interview with Vulture. “I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011. Her writing is surreal and inventive, always,” she said.
“She just takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, and she’s been doing it consistently for over a decade. I love to see hard work like that pay off.”
Charli has also pushed back on the meaning of “Sympathy is a Knife” as being about Swift.
“People are gonna think what they want to think,” she said last year. “That song is about me and my feelings and my anxiety and the way my brain creates narratives and stories in my head when I feel insecure and how I don’t want to be in those situations physically when I feel self-doubt.”
Charli opened for Swift on her 2018 Reputation stadium tour, where she said that while she was “really grateful,” it felt like “as an artist, it kind of felt like I was getting up onstage and waving to five-year-olds”. Charli later apologised for the comment.
The Independent’s Roisin O’Connor gave The Life of a Showgirl four stars in her review, describing Swift as “the star, the ringmaster and the circus all in one”.
“Having completed Eras, the biggest tour in music in history, and shattered a few more industry records, Swift has seemingly raised the bar higher than any other artist can hope to reach – at least this decade. So what next? In the case of this album, her answer seems to be to go as rogue as she fancies,” O’Connor writes.
“Sonically, this is one of Swift’s most experimental albums, one where she flits between Stevie Nicks-indebted pop-rock (“Opalite”), the Folklore-meets-Reputation backdrop of “Honey” – with its stuttery beats, fuzzy Hammond organs and cascading piano notes – and even Jackson 5 funk on the innuendo-ridden “Wood”, the most outrageous song she’s ever released. In theme, too, she is giddy and in love one moment, pen sharpened and ready to draw blood the next.”
