Charli XCX has refused to comment on whether Taylor Swift‘s ‘Actually Romantic’ is a diss track directed at the ‘Brat’ singer.
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Following the release of her 12th studio album ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’, many fans interpreted the lyrics to the song as a swipe at Charli. “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” Swift sings. “High-fived my ex and then said you’re glad he ghosted me / Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face / Some people might be offended / But it’s actually sweet.”
Many considered this a rebuttal to Charli’s ‘Sympathy Is A Knife’ from ‘Brat’, on which she sang: “Don’t know if I’m spiralling / One voice tells me that they laugh / George says I’m just paranoid / Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show / Fingers crossed behind my back / I hope they break up real quick.”
This line stuck out to fans upon the track’s release, as Charli is now married to The 1975 drummer George Daniel, while Swift was in a brief relationship with that band’s frontman Matty Healy in 2023.
Swift has since said ‘Actually Romantic’ is “a song about realising that someone else has kind of had a one-sided, adversarial relationship with you that you didn’t know about. And all of a sudden they start doing too much and they start letting you know that actually, you’ve been living in their head rent-free and you had no idea.”
Swift (via BBC News) then shed further light on the song’s meaning, saying it is “a love letter to someone who hates you”. But she still didn’t reveal who she was singing about.
Now in a new interview with Vanity Fair, when asked about the track, Charli refused to comment on the speculation.
Neither artist has previously confirmed whether their songs are about each other but they have both publicly defended each other since the release of ‘Sympathy Is A Knife’ last year.
At a concert in Brazil in June last year, a fan shouted “Taylor Swift is dead”, prompting Charli to criticise the fan: “Can the people who do this please stop. Online or at my shows. It is the opposite of what I want and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community. I will not tolerate it.”
In August last year, Swift said: “I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011. 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.”
Elsewhere in her Vanity Fair interview, Charli also spoke about how she found it difficult to know where she fitted into the music industry until ‘Brat’ came about.
Swift meanwhile, recently achieved her 15th US Number One album with ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’.
