The Inspiration Behind Taylor Swift's 'Picture to Burn' Revealed
(photo: Bruce Gilkas/FilmMagic)
Taylor Swift is probably going to want to shake this off. Long before she had flings with Harry Styles, Jake Gyllenhaal, Conor Kennedy, John Mayer, Taylor Lautner, and Joe Jonas, Tay had a considerably less famous ex. And now, the inspiration behind her 2008 song “Picture to Burn” has been revealed.
According to Britain’s Daily Mail, Swift wrote the song after her onetime high school boyfriend, Jordan Alford, hooked up with one of her close friends, breaking Swift’s heart.
"We were kind of good friends at school, later not so much," said Chelsea, who later married Alford, and was classmates with Swift at Tennessee’s Henderson High School. "She dated him, that’s why. They dated in freshman year, but then after that, girl code, once you date an ex-boyfriend you’re not friends anymore. ‘Picture to Burn’ is about him. Because he’s always had big old trucks and stuff."
In the song, Swift sings, “State the obvious, I didn’t get my perfect fantasy/I realize you love yourself more than you could ever love me/So go and tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy/That’s fine/ I’ll tell mine that you’re gay.” Swift also calls her ex a “redneck heartbreak” and expresses disdain for his pickup truck.
Swift’s old friends say they learned that the song was about Jordan from Abigail Anderson, another one of Swift’s gal pals. “We just thought it was funny. [Jordan] was like, ‘I’m not a redneck! She makes me look like some redneck!’ But other than that we just thought it was kind of funny,” Chelsea said.
Although Chelsea admitted that she and Swift “exchanged a few words over a locker fight” when they were 14, they rekindled their friendship when she was in college and Swift even hooked up with Chelsea and her younger sister for coffee. “She was really cool, she met us at a Starbucks and let my sister sing to her and gave her autographs, she was really, really sweet,” Chelsea told the Daily Mail. “She did that and we hadn’t talked in years.”
Now that Chelsea has spilled the beans on Taylor’s past, we’re betting it may be more than a few years before they talk again.
As for Swift, she has a long-standing policy not to reveal who her songs are about, she said earlier this year in an interview with Australian radio station 2DayFM.
"My first album came out when I was 16, so I would write about my life as I saw it, as I felt it. And then what happens is as you get more successful, which you’re lucky if that happens, you have more and more people paying attention to what you’re doing, and you’ve been doing it the same way your entire career as a songwriter, but all of a sudden the perspective has changed,” Swift said. “They use kind of you writing songs about your life as a way to play detective. And for me, I have a really strict personal policy that I never name names, so anybody saying that a song is about a specific person is purely speculating.”
