Courtney Love might not be a bona fide Swiftie, but she can still admit that Taylor Swift’s lyrics have merit.
“While I may not love Swift musically, her lyrics when she’s angry resonate with me,” Love, 60, told the U.K.’s The Standard in a profile published on Tuesday, November 26, expressing her confusion over how fans overanalyze every word in both her and Swift’s songs.
“Frankly, I don’t understand why people do this with Swift either — who cares if she dates high-profile people?” Love noted. “Like any woman writing about relationships — dating and breaking up — it happens all the time! All musicians write about broken hearts: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan (though sideways), [David] Bowie.”
She added, “I find it middlebrow and boring to overanalyze them. Those academic papers I’ve read are hilarious!”
Love, for her part, does enjoy reading academic essays about her music, calling it “free, wacky therapy.”
Just as Love is known for pulling from her real life in song, so does 34-year-old Swift. Much of Swift’s discography — save for the character-driven Folklore and Evermore — is inspired by her past experiences and relationships.
“I needed to make [The Tortured Poets Department]. It was really a lifeline for me,” Swift said during one of her Australian concerts in February. “It sort of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through life, and I’ve never had an album where I’ve needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets.”
Swift has also famously opted against naming which of her exes inspired certain songs, though fans have recently speculated that April’s TTPD is based on her respective splits from Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy. There are also a handful of tracks that seemingly chart Swift’s current relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce.
Many of her current and past partners, with the exception of 35-year-old Kelce, have also opted against speaking out about Swift’s lyrical inspiration.
Love, meanwhile, previously claimed that Swift was “not important” as an artist.
“She might be a safe space for girls, and she’s probably the Madonna of now, but she’s not interesting as an artist,” Love told the Evening Standard in April. “It’s great that there are so many successful women in the music industry, but lots of them are becoming a cliché. Now, every successful woman is cloned, so there is just too much music. They’re all the same. If you play something on Spotify, you get bombarded with a lot of stuff that’s exactly the same.”
Swift has never publicly addressed Love’s criticism.
