Taylor Swift Fans Think ‘Tattooed Golden Retriever’ Line on ‘Tortured Poets Department’ Is Definitely About This Shaggy Rocker Ex
Let the games begin! Quickly after Taylor Swift dropped her The Tortured Poets Department album, Swifties were sifting through the lyrics to play their favorite parlor game: who is this lyric about?
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And while longtime fans were sure the singer’s 11th studio album — which, in a surprise, is a 31-track, double-disc, two-hour behemoth — would plumb into the end of her affair with former longtime boyfriend actor Joe Alwyn, or perhaps gush over new beau NFL player Travis Kelce — the lyrics many keyed in on were not about either man.
In fact, a number of Swifties speculated that on the title track she references a fellow musician who Taylor allegedly dated for a brief period in early 2023, The 1975’s shambolic singer Matty Healy. The lines in question refer to an ex as a “tattooed golden retriever,” which many Swifties thought seemed to poetically sum up the hedonistic, cigarette-puffing, inked-up rock rabble rouser who seamlessly swings from eager-to-please to gratingly off-putting.
“You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate/ We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist/ I scratch your head, you fall asleep/ Like a tattooed golden retriever,” she sings on the collection’s gauzy second song. Healy often puffs cigs on stage during his band’s shows and his band released a song called “Chocolate” in 2013.
Other clues? A seeming reference to Healy’s one-time friend Lucy Dacus, in which Swift sings, “Sometimes I wonder if you’re gonna screw this up with me/ But you told Lucy you’d kill yourself if I ever leave/ And I had said that to Jack about you so I felt seen/ Everyone we know understands why it’s meant to be/ Because we’re crazy,” which also name-checks longtime friend and the song’s producer, Jack Antonoff. While Swift, and her team, never confirmed that the two were romantically linked, Swifties, as usual, dug deep for receipts.
“TTPD – Thank you Taylor for my new favorite description of Matty Healy, ‘Tattooed golden retriever.’ The Lucy & Jack name drop & wedding ring thing here triggered some kind of sleeper agent in me. Kinda wish this was the lead single but it feels too personal to be. 8/10 #TTPD,” wrote one, with another quipping, “the matty healy thing could have been a bizarre wrinkle in taylor swift lore and now it is the backbone of a major turning point in her career lmao.”
Oner song detective launched a deep-dive X thread with seemingly connected all the dots, including, “‘you left your typewriter at my apartment’ matty mentioned his love for typewriters multiple times, he spoke about it in this interview for example and a typewriter is also always a part of the stage of the 1975,” as well as “also when multiple magazines reported in may 2023 that matty is writing songs with taylor, they mentioned that he already left stuff like his guitar effect pedals, audio interfaces, synths and his macbook at her nyc apartment where he got papped multiple times the day before.”
At press time it did not appear that Healy had commented on the song.
Check out the fans comments and speculation below.
Gil Kaufman
Billboard
