More than a decade after Taylor Swift released the 2010 track “Dear John,” it seems she’s not the only Taylor mining that messy John Mayer breakup for material.
Swift’s ex-boyfriend Taylor Lautner has shared his two cents about the singer’s upcoming re-recorded album, “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” weeks after she announced the record on Instagram. The “Twilight” star, seemingly the subject of Swift’s “Back to December,” said in a recent interview that he’s not too worried about his breakup resurfacing.
“I think it’s a great album. Yeah, I feel safe,” the actor told “Today” on Tuesday. Lautner, however, did express concern for another one of Swift’s high-profile exes.
He added: “Praying for John.”
For Swifties, it’s no mystery that Lautner was referring to guitarist John Mayer, who dated Swift from 2009 to 2010. She was 19 at the time and Mayer was 32. Their age gap, and so much more, made it into Swift’s song “Dear John.”
“Dear John, I see it all, now it was wrong / Don’t you think 19 is too young / To be played by your dark twisted games, when I loved you so?,” she sang.
Years later, Mayer dissed the track, telling Rolling Stone in 2012 that the song “made me feel terrible.”
“I didn’t deserve it. I’m pretty good at taking accountability now, and I never did anything to deserve that,” he told the magazine. “It was a really lousy thing for her to do.”
He said the 2010 song “humiliated me” and claimed it was an example of “cheap songwriting.”
“I know she’s the biggest thing in the world, and I’m not trying to sink anybody’s ship, but I think it’s abusing your talent to rub your hands together and go, ‘Wait till he gets a load of this!’’ Mayer added. “That’s bulls—.”
On Wednesday, Lautner took his “Today” joke over to TikTok, where he posted a cheeky video of himself kneeling and praying to the sound of Swift’s “Dear John.”
“#prayforjohn,” he captioned the video.
Lautner, married to “The Squeeze” podcast host Taylor Dome, doesn’t seem to have bad blood with Swift, but earlier this year he said he has some regrets.
The actor, who briefly dated Swift in 2009, said in a February episode of “The Squeeze” that he “probably should’ve said something” when Kanye West infamously interrupted Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. He said he thought it was all a “practiced and rehearsed skit.”
Swift, who has long since moved on from the infamous incident, launched her Eras tour in March.
During her May 5 show in Nashville, the Grammy-winning singer announced that she would release a re-recording of “Speak Now.” Out July 7, the studio album will be her latest effort to take back ownership of the six-album catalog she lost when Scooter Braun purchased — and subsequently sold — her previous record label, Big Machine.
“The songs that came from this time in my life were marked by their brutal honesty, unfiltered diaristic confessions and wild wistfulness,” she wrote on Instagram. “I love this album because it tells a tale of growing up, flailing, flying and crashing … and living to speak about it.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
