A Taylor Swift Song Reveals That She Has Feared Being Replaced By A Young Artist Like Olivia Rodrigo Since She Was 22 Years Old, And People Think It's The Root Of Their Rumored Feud
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On Saturday, speculation surrounding Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift's relationship once again reached fever pitch thanks to a new interview.
You may recall that back in 2021, the same year that Olivia entered the music scene, Taylor released her version of her 2012 album Red, complete with previously-unheard tracks "from the vault."
One of those vault songs was "Nothing New," which reveals that Taylor, now 33, has been anxiously fearing the day that she is replaced by a fresh, younger singer since she was 22 years old.
If you need reminding, Taylor was 17 when she first burst onto the scene, and this song was originally written for her fourth studio album.
"Lord, what will become of me once I've lost my novelty?" Taylor questions in "Nothing New," before singing in the chorus: "I've had too much to drink tonight / And I know it's sad, but this is what I think about / And I wake up in the middle of the night / It's like I can feel time moving."
"Will you still want me when I'm nothing new?" she muses.
In the second verse, which was written by Taylor but is sung by her friend Phoebe Bridgers, the lyrics ask: "Are we only biding time 'til I lose your attention and someone else lights up the room? People love an ingénue."
But it's the bridge that is particularly telling, with Taylor openly admitting that she is dreading the day that she meets a young woman that is following in her industry footsteps.
"I know someday I'm gonna meet her, it's a fever dream / The kind of radiance you only have at 17 / She'll know the way, and then she'll say she got the map from me / I'll say I'm happy for her, then I'll cry myself to sleep," she sings.
When Red (Taylor's Version) was released two years ago, many expressed their disbelief that "Nothing New" had actually been written almost 10 years prior as they questioned why Taylor would be worrying about becoming old news so early on in her career.
But one of the diary entries that the star published alongside a special edition of her 2019 album Lover confirms that this really was the case, and also offers a deeper insight into Taylor's thought process when she wrote the song.
"I've been thinking a lot about getting older and relevancy and how all my heroes have all ended up alone," the handwritten diary entry dated March 2012 reads. "I wrote a song on the plane ride from Perth to Sydney on the Appalachian dulcimer I bought the day of my flight. I bought it because Joni played one most of her Blue record. I taught myself to play 'A Case of You.'"
"Anyway, I wrote a song on it called 'Nothin New' and it's about being scared of aging and things changing and losing what you have," Taylor goes on. "It says 'I'm getting older and less sure of what you like about me anyway.' And in the chorus it says 'How can a person know everything at 18, and nothing at 22? And will you still want me.. when I'm nothin new.' It's a really vulnerable song, but I think it's important to say."
sooo this song was written in march of 2012… vault song maybe?! (the song is called “nothing new” and it’s on the second page!!) pic.twitter.com/siPfpipPpD
— ryan 🌙 (@coveredinsnoww) June 19, 2021
Twitter @coveredinsnoww / Via Twitter: @coveredinsnoww
And it's perhaps unsurprising that Olivia was the first person to pop into listeners' minds when they heard the song for the first time, with the parallels being undeniable.
After all, with Taylor now being in the industry for 17 years, Olivia, now 20, spent most of her life being a dedicated fan of the star's before embarking on her own career.
In fact, Olivia has always been incredibly open about the way that Taylor inspired her, and even credited her as "the reason" she is a songwriter.
The newly-established star began her career as a Disney actor in the late 2010s, but transitioned into music in 2021 at the age of 17. That same year, she said in an interview that she was "the biggest Swifitie in the whole world."
At first, Taylor seemed supportive. When Olivia's debut song "Driver's License" charted at number three on iTunes, directly below two of Taylor's songs, Olivia shared a screenshot to Instagram and proudly wrote: "next to taylor on the us i tunes chart i’m in a puddle of tears."
Taylor reciprocated by commenting on Olivia's post: "I say that’s my baby and I’m proud.” Olivia then shared the comment to her social media page with the caption: “What is breathing?”
Taylor later posted a video of Olivia singing to her Instagram story and gushed about her talent, and she went on to send the teen a handwritten note and gifts.
Olivia was clearly overwhelmed by the attention from her idol, and showed off a ring that Taylor had sent her during an interview with Ryan Seacrest. “She gave me this ring because she said she wore one just like it when she wrote Red and she wanted me to have one like it and all of this amazing stuff," Olivia said. "She’s like hand-wrapped these gifts.”
The two finally met in person at the Brit Awards in May 2021, where they posed for a sweet photo together as Olivia's record-breaking career continued to climb.
But when Olivia's debut album Sour was released to huge critical acclaim shortly afterwards, the situation seemingly, well, soured between the two singers.
When the album was released, Taylor was credited on the song "1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back,” which uses an interpolation of her track “New Year’s Day.”
In an interview with Zach Sang, Olivia explained that she wrote her lyrics over the chords for Taylor's 2017 album track and that she felt "lucky" to have had the interpolation approved.
But in July 2021, fans noticed that Taylor had been retroactively credited on Olivia's hugely popular single "Deja Vu" too. She and her collaborators Jack Antonoff and St. Vincent were added alongside Olivia and songwriter-producer Dan Nigro due to an apparent interpolation of Taylor's song "Cruel Summer," but many listeners have struggled to hear the similarities.
And then in September, Taylor's close friend Hayley Williams of Paramore and her bandmate Josh Farro were retroactively given songwriting credits on another of Olivia's hit singles, "Good 4 U," with it being claimed that it is similar to Paramore's 2007 song "Misery Business."
Billboard later revealed that Olivia had given up 50% of the royalties on each of the songs as a result of these retroactive credits.
While neither Taylor, Hayley, or Olivia publicly commented on the situation, many expressed their discomfort at the way that an up-and-coming new artist had seemingly been targeted by more established stars, and other musicians came to Olivia’s defense.
When the teen was accused of copying a guitar riff from one of Elvis Costello’s songs in her track “Brutal” he tweeted: “This is fine by me. It's how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy. That's what I did."
And Adam Levine also discussed this “gray area" in the music industry, saying: "These are tricky things and anyone who's ever written a song knows that you rip something off inadvertently, and it makes it to tape, and then it's released and then there's a lawsuit.”
"Sometimes it's not warranted that people take legal action. And I think there's definitely become more of a gray area that's reared its ugly head these days,” he went on. "I do think that we should probably meet this with a little more compassion and understanding and try to find a way... All this calling out, it's like, music is a creative thing and I just hate to see it crushed."
And while the credit debacle was handled incredibly privately by all teams involved, there was a palpable change in Olivia and Taylor's public relationship afterwards.
Gone were the days where the two would shout one another out on social media. In fact, they stopped mentioning each other all together as their budding friendship seemingly came to an abrupt end.
Then, in October 2021, Olivia reflected on encountering "mean girls" in the music industry in a Rolling Stone interview with Alanis Morissette.
Looking back on her early success, Alanis told the singer: “There was a lot of bullying and a lot of jealousy and a lot of people whom I’d adored my whole life being mean girls,” to which Olivia replied: “Same!”
Olivia's career continued to thrive in spite of the drama, and in 2022 she became the second youngest artist to be nominated in all four of the general Grammys categories in the same ceremony — including the much-coveted “Album of the Year.” If you’re wondering, the youngest artist to achieve this was Billie Eilish in 2020.
Due to the interpolation credits, Taylor was initially included alongside Olivia's team for the Sour nomination, in addition to her own nomination for her album Evermore. However, the Recording Academy later backtracked and removed Taylor and her collaborators' names from Olivia's work, stating that they would not be eligible for a Grammy if Sour won due to the academy's guidelines surrounding interpolated tracks.
Shortly afterwards, Olivia alluded to the song credit situation as she admitted to Time: “It was really frustrating to see people discredit and deny my creativity.” Her producer then pointedly added to the publication: "It seems like people get funny about things when songs become really popular."
While neither Taylor or Olivia's albums won the Album of the Year Grammy, Olivia did walk away with three accolades that evening; Best Pop Vocal Album, Best New Artist, and Best Pop Solo Performance.
Fast-forward to 2023, and Taylor has publicly aligned herself with Sabrina Carpenter, who is widely assumed to be Olivia's love rival from the Sour era.
Just days before "Vampire's" release in June, Taylor announced that Sabrina — who she referred to as a “sweet angel princess” — would be joining her on her international Eras tour as a special guest.
Meanwhile, "Vampire" marked Olivia's first song since everything unfolded, and the references to the singer feeling used and blindsided by somebody that she once loved made it easy to connect the track to her former idol.
Not to mention that the entire concept of being bled dry by a “vampire” could be a metaphor for the money that Taylor earned by securing a 50% credit on one of Olivia’s biggest hits.
In the opening lyrics, Olivia accuses the subject of her song of building a “castle” out of people that they “pretend to care about,” which could easily be correlated to the royalties that Taylor banked after feigning friendship with Olivia. “I loved you truly,” Olivia recalls. “Gotta laugh at the stupidity.”
“I used to think I was smart / But you made me look so naive / The way you sold me for parts / As you sunk your teeth into me,” Olivia continues, with being sold for parts a potential analogy to the way that Taylor secured herself partial credit for Olivia’s work.
In the second verse, Olivia sings that she was warned that the subject of her song was “bad, bad news” and shares her regret at believing their defense that all of their critics were just “crazy.”
And self-proclaimed “mastermind” Taylor is the first to admit that her reputation precedes her. She has also had her fair share of public feuds over the years, which makes it plausible that after almost two decades in the industry there are people who might speak out against her to upcoming new singers.
Olivia's subsequent lyric: “Went for me and not her / Cause girls your age know better” could then be a potential reference to her being an easy target because she is a young and inexperienced artist compared to veterans in the industry who may be harder to manipulate.
While on the surface references to "true love" in "Vampire" led many to believe that the song is about romantic love, most notably Olivia's relationship with her ex boyfriend Adam Faze, it is just as possible that it could be a reference to friendship or idolization.
Especially as shortly after the song’s release, a source close to Olivia bluntly told People: “The song isn’t about Adam Faze.”
Olivia herself vaguely said that she wrote "Vampire" because she was "upset about a certain situation," and that it is a song about "feeling confused and hurt."
It has been argued that the way that Taylor and Olivia’s relationship seemingly unfolded indisputably ties into Taylor’s own frank admission in "Nothing New."
"Even if Nothing New wasn’t written about Olivia, I think the song tells a lot about how Taylor feels towards new and upcoming artists," one person wrote on a Reddit forum. "I always felt like the line 'then she’ll say she got the map from me' about a young female artist hints that Taylor expects some credit for the new generation of female artists. I’d imagine Olivia wants to be her own artist and not feel like she 'owes' her success to someone else."
"Taylor is openly insecure about the prospect of losing relevancy and being replaced (see The Lucky One, Nothing New, the Miss Americana Netflix doc)," another agreed. "I’m sure she didn’t want to be buddy buddy with someone who’s being called 'The next Taylor Swift'."
"Taylor clearly has a horrifying fear of being replaced and likely sees Olivia as a legitimate threat," one more commented.
Someone else claimed that Taylor only appears to be comfortable supporting young artists if they stay in their place, and don't show signs that they may surpass her.
![<div><p>"Taylor just doesn’t seem like a girls girl to me. She’ll uplift women if it looks good to her brand, but the moment someone comes for even a piece of the pie, she gets threatened," they wrote. "[Olivia] has the pipes and the songwriting chops and she’s so young and if all this speculation is true, that must have scared the shit out of Taylor."</p><p>And others have argued that Taylor missed an opportunity by collaborating with Phoebe instead of Olivia on "Nothing New," and suggested that this decision is evidence of tension between them.</p><p>"I really think Olivia was the choice for this collab before Phoebe," one person <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=74679X1524629&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.buzzfeed.com%2Fstephaniesoteriou%2Ftaylor-swift-song-fear-olivia-rodrigo-rumored-feud-1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FTaylorSwift%2Fcomments%2Fqyk3pu%2Fnothing_news_bridge_reminds_me_so_much_of_olivia%2F&xcust=7528265%7CBF-VERIZON&xs=1" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-ylk="slk:wrote;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas" class="link ">wrote</a>. "Taylor usually loves making media narratives as her own, so it would have been intuitive for her to do this with Olivia. I suspect it's about the rumored fallout between them."</p></div><span> Emma Mcintyre / Getty Images for TAS Rights Management</span>](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/AQO18P2r0U9gAL2zWJcxhA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTY0MA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/buzzfeed_articles_778/58dc721ea7b024d7a834e4d35209e094)
"Taylor just doesn’t seem like a girls girl to me. She’ll uplift women if it looks good to her brand, but the moment someone comes for even a piece of the pie, she gets threatened," they wrote. "[Olivia] has the pipes and the songwriting chops and she’s so young and if all this speculation is true, that must have scared the shit out of Taylor."
And others have argued that Taylor missed an opportunity by collaborating with Phoebe instead of Olivia on "Nothing New," and suggested that this decision is evidence of tension between them.
"I really think Olivia was the choice for this collab before Phoebe," one person wrote. "Taylor usually loves making media narratives as her own, so it would have been intuitive for her to do this with Olivia. I suspect it's about the rumored fallout between them."
During an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers ahead of Red (Taylor's Version)'s release, Taylor explained why she asked Phoebe to sing on the "really special" song.
She said: "I sent it to Phoebe and said: 'It would mean the world to me if you would do this as a duet,' because I really wanted another female artist who I loved to sing it with me.”
Taylor then added: “I think it has a very female artist perspective that we go through that experience."
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