Many moons ago, in a more innocent time before “I’mma let you finish†and Taylor Lautner and the racist penis incident, Taylor Swift and John Mayer spent some time together in what at least one of them believed to be a romantic situation. Then John Mayer dumped TSwift. The particulars of this relationship made their way into “Dear John,†the highly dramatic (and pretty effective) song that Swift not-so-secretly wrote about Mayer; Mayer, for his part, never responded, or confirmed the nature of the relationship, or spoke about Taylor Swift in any real way. But John Mayer has an album to promote now, and John Mayer is great at giving quotes, and so here come the “Dear John†rebuttals. (Vulture has been waiting so long to type that sentence!) So, what did John think about the song? “It made me feel terrible.†Uh-oh, there’s more:
He claims he wasn’t even that mean to Taylor:
“I’m pretty good at taking accountability now, and I never did anything to deserve that. It was a really lousy thing for her to do.â€
And Taylor didn’t even let him know that the song was coming:
“I never got an e-mail. I never got a phone call,†he says. “I was really caught off-guard, and it really humiliated me at a time when I’d already been dressed down.
(To be fair, she does explain in the song why she stopped answering calls, and then she says that the song is to “let [him] know why.†So that one’s maybe not on Taylor.)
As for the “too young to be messed with†line:
“I don’t want to go into that.â€
And then Mayer went for the knife:
“I will say as a songwriter that I think it’s kind of 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!’ That’s bullshit.â€
Ohhh, John, you didn’t. Little girls in tutus will be heckling you in airports for all eternity now. “Mean†was just rededicated in your honor. The songwriting! That’s too low.