Rumors have been swirling about a feud between musicians Charli XCX and Taylor Swift since the former’s album, Brat, dropped earlier this summer.
In the track ‘Sympathy is a Knife’, Charli seemingly takes aim at Taylor with the lyric, “I don’t want to see you backstage at my boyfriend’s show, fingers crossed I hope they break up quick.”
‘How does this reference Taylor?’, we hear you ask. At the time of writing Brat, Taylor was dating 1975 frontman, Matty Healy, who is in the band with Charli’s now-fiancé, George Daniel. Hence why Charli would see her reported nemesis backstage.
The lyrics sent Taylor’s fans into overdrive, speculating the whole track was about their idol, but any bad blood was swiftly shut down by Taylor, when she provided comment for Charli’s cover interview in Vulture.
Speaking on her fellow musician, Taylor told the magazine: “I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011,” Taylor began.
“Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. 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.” Taylor has publicly praised Charli in the past, too, adding the same track to a breakup playlist in 2015.
The two musicians toured together several years later in 2018, when Charli opened for Taylor on her Reputation stadium tour, but it was that slot that made Charli decide she was done with being a support act.
“I’ve done so much of it, and it really cemented my status as this underdog character, which I like now,” she says. “But I need to just own my own [expletive] finally.”
Of her experience on the tour, Charli wrote on social media: “I am extremely grateful to Taylor for inviting me to open for her. She’s one of the biggest artists of my generation and the Reputation tour was one of the biggest tours in history.”
Charli is yet to comment on Taylor’s response to ‘Sympathy is a Knife’, but given she has been releasing remixes of several songs on the album (‘Guess’ with Billie Eilish, and ‘Girl, So Confusing’ with Lorde, whom she also had a rumored feud with), fans are keeping their fingers crossed that Charli and Taylor will work it out on a remix of the Brat track.
