Last night, Taylor Swift was spotted on a girls’ night out with friend and fellow celebrity Sophie Turner, much to the internet’s delight. Swift and Turner share an ex, musician Joe Jonas, from whom Turner is in the midst of divorcing.
Turner has been subject to an alleged smear campaign from Jonas’ camp, with various press outlets accusing the former Game of Thrones star of partying and staying out late, as opposed to an angelic Jonas, who somehow manages to be a stay-at-home dad while touring the world every single year. Needless to say, fans weren’t convinced, and the campaign backfired so badly it made everyone firmly side with Team Sophie. Based on yesterday’s photos, it seems that Swift is also a supporter of the team.
Swift and Jonas dated for a few months all the way back in mid-2008, when they were 18 and 19 years old, respectively. The brief relationship ended, rather fittingly, with a brief phone call from Jonas. On the Ellen Degeneres show, Swift said of the relationship, “When I find a person that is right for me, he’ll be wonderful, and when I look at that person, I’m not even gonna be able to remember the boy who broke up with me over the phone in 25 seconds when I was 18.”
What songs did Taylor Swift write about Joe Jonas?
Taylor Swift rarely comments directly on who inspired her songs, but it is generally accepted that much of her second studio album, Fearless, is about Joe Jonas. In the Swiftie canon, the song “Forever & Always” from that album is thought to be about her relationship with Jonas. On the re-recording of the album 2021’s Fearless (Taylor’s Version), the songs “Mr. Perfectly Fine” and “You All Over Me” are widely considered in Swiftdom to be about Jonas. At the time, Jonas’ then-wife, Sophie Turner, joked about listening to “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” writing “It’s not NOT a bop” on Instagram.
On Swift’s subsequent album Speak Now, songs like “Last Kiss” are allegedly about Jonas. “Better Than Revenge” — a song Swift has some regrets about — is thought to be about Jonas and his relationship with Camilla Belle, as he dated Belle shortly after breaking up with Swift. On the re-release, Swift changed some lyrics thought to be slut-shaming Belle, re-writing “she’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress” to “he was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches” after years of controversy regarding the lyric.
“Holy Ground”, a song from Swift’s 2012 album Red, is also speculated to be inspired by Jonas, despite the couple breaking up four years prior. According to some Swiftie theorists, the lyrics “Back to a first-glance feeling on New York time/Back when you fit in my poems like a perfect rhyme” reference Swift performing with the Jonas Brothers at Madison Square Garden in New York City. This was further fueled by Swift’s writing, “When you came to the show in SD,” in the released liner notes for this song, as Jonas attended one of Swift’s concerts in San Diego.
One of Swift’s songs from her 2020 album Folklore, “Invisible String,” is all but confirmed to reference Joe Jonas. Not in a romantic way, as Swift was four years into a relationship with another Joe — actor Joe Alwyn — but as a marker of how much she has changed over the past few years, especially after finding love with Alwyn.
“Cold was the steel of my axe to grind/For the boys who broke my heart/Now I send their babies presents,” references Swift’s tendency to write revenge songs about her exes before befriending them in later life. Jonas was one of few exes of Swift’s to have become a father since they broke up, having welcomed two children with Turner.
Previously, Swift had sent baby gifts to pal Gigi Hadid and former frenemy Katy Perry, and Swift had interacted with Jonas’ then-wife a few times on social media. Speaking about “Invisible String” on her Disney+ documentary Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, Swift said, “I remember I wrote it right after I sent an ex a baby gift. I was just like, ‘Man, life is great. This is a full signifier that life is great.’”
In some ways, “Invisible String” is arguably more of a reference to Swift’s friendship with Turner, something that seems to have come out the other side of Turner’s divorce from Jonas. Swift is also known for writing songs about her friends, such as “How You Get The Girl” in 1989, which is about Lena Dunham and then-boyfriend Jack Antonoff, Swift’s frequent collaborator. With that in mind, Turner could get another shoutout from Swift in the near future, maybe in time for 1989 (Taylor’s Version) next month.