Taylor Swift has been singing about love since 2006, but the 30-year-old pop star chose only one album as her “breakup” record: Red. Much to Swifties’ interest, this album came out a year after her breakup from Donnie Darko star Jake Gyllenhaal, 39! “I look back on this [Red] as my true breakup album, every other album has flickers of different things,” Taylor said in an audio snippet from her upcoming interview in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums List podcast with Amazon Music.
On the subject of Red, Taylor added, “But this was an album that I wrote specifically about pure, absolute, to the core, heartbreak.” Of course, this led to a resurgence of age-old theories that Taylor’s ex, Jake, was supposedly the muse behind this lyrical “heartbreak.”
“Jake Gyllenhaal did this,” one Swiftie tweeted in response to the podcast teaser, while another fan tweeted, “i’d like to thank jake gyllenhaal for breaking taylor swift’s heart because red really is her best album.” Swifties have long speculated that Taylor’s relationship with Jake, which lasted for roughly three months in the fall of 2010 up until the New Year, inspired her 2012 pop album. Specifically, it’s widely believed that the songs “We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together” and “The Moment I Knew” off Red were about Jake!
Jake Gyllenhaal did this
— ᴬᴸᴱˣ 🇳🇴 | 𝑓𝑜𝑙𝑘𝑙𝑜𝑟𝑒 | BIDEN-HARRIS | (@LWTrebellion) October 29, 2020
There’s another song that many fans have insisted is about the Brokeback Mountain star: “All Too Well,” which is actually found on the deluxe album version of Red. In fact, fans believed that Jake accidentally referred to this bittersweet track this past September! The actor shared a childhood yearbook photo of himself wearing glasses, which just so happened to line up with Taylor’s lyrics in “All Too Well”: “Photo album on the counter, your cheeks were turning red / You used to be a little kid with glasses in a twin-size bed.”
It has been nine years since they broke up, and fans are still just as fascinated with Taylor and Jake’s extremely short-lived romance. These days, Taylor is in a relationship with Boy, Erased star Joe Alwyn, 29, while Jake is dating French model Jeanne Cadieu, 24.
