During 2010, the gossip circuit linked Taylor to three famous men: John Mayer, Glee star Cory Monteith and her ‘Mine’ video co-star Toby Hemingway. However, the most discussed rumour was that surrounding her relationship with a Hollywood heart-throb. After successfully co-hosting Saturday Night Live, Taylor returned to the studio for a subsequent episode to support her friend Emma Stone, who was herself appearing on the show. While she was there, Taylor met one of Hollywood’s most famous young men of recent times. They agreed to meet up again for a date. The relationship that developed between her and Jake Gyllenhaal would be quite an experience for Taylor, and the break-up would inspire some of her best-known songs.
You could say Gyllenhaal was put on this earth to act. He was born in Los Angeles in 1980, the son of a director father and screenwriter mother. He began acting at the age of 10, but it was not until his late teens and early twenties that he hit the big time. In 1999 he took a lead role in the coming-of-age story October Sky. Two years later he made himself cult royalty when he starred in the indie flick Donnie Darko. More recently, he has carved out a place for himself as a versatile talent, appearing in further indie flicks – such as The Good Girl – as well as mainstream blockbusters like The Day After Tomorrow and powerful, critically acclaimed dramas such as Brokeback Mountain. He has been nominated for an Academy Award and won a BAFTA.
As well as his thespian activity, he has been much discussed for his good looks and his love life. Gyllenhaal has dated actresses Kirsten Dunst and Reese Witherspoon. He was named one of People magazine’s ‘50 Most Beautiful People’ in 2006 and listed as one of the same journal’s ‘Hottest Bachelors’ in the same year. He has also been voted top of several major ‘fanciable male’ polls by gay men. Gyllenhaal had split from Witherspoon ten months before he met Taylor. When Taylor ran into him backstage at SNL she was very familiar with his story. A surprisingly cautious ‘source’ was quoted in People as saying the two ‘were careful not to be seen too close’ as they ‘walked around together backstage’. The source concluded: ‘It was hard to tell if they were together.’ There was a considerable age gap between Taylor and Jake: he is nine years older than her. That, and the differing natures of their fame, would become an issue for them as the heady early days drifted into the reality of greater familiarity, with all the challenges that can entail.
After meeting at the television studios, they were seen together in Brooklyn, near his sister Maggie’s home. They then stopped for lunch at the Al Di La restaurant, with Emma Stone joining them to eat. Tongues were wagging and it was only to be a matter of time before Taylor was asked about the rumours. When she appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the host asked her how optimistic she was about her love life. ‘I’m always optimistic about love,’ said Taylor. ‘Yes, always, sometimes.’ Ellen was in a particularly impish mood and replied: ‘Especially if your boyfriend is Jake Gyllenhaal, because he’s very handsome.’
Later in November, Taylor and the actor were seen at the luxury Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California. Taylor reportedly ‘laughed at everything Jake said’ as they ate ice cream and yoghurt together. Taylor had yoghurt with rainbow sprinkles, while Gyllenhaal opted for Swiss chocolate chip. She also stood on tiptoes and measured her height against Jake’s. Witnesses said the couple ‘smiled a ton’ and were ‘happy’ and ‘friendly’. Things seemed to be going well.
Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, wife of Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, had been a friend of both Jake and – through Martin – Taylor for some time. She told USA Today that she had hosted a dinner for the young couple in London. Everything seemed to be going so well. So smitten were they that Taylor reportedly changed her Thanksgiving plans at the last moment and chose to spend it with the Gyllenhaals rather than with the Swifts. During the festival in New York, she met his family – a sure sign that a relationship is getting serious. The visit seemed to be a success, with Jake’s sister Maggie telling Us Weekly it had all gone ‘great’.
Then came the now-famous photographs of the couple sipping maple-syrup lattes from Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn – the very epitome of the Fall-loving American young adult. Then, having flown to Nashville, they were seen on romantic strolls and taking further pit stops for coffee and a late breakfast. Among the cafés the caffeine-keen couple popped into were Frothy Monkey, Crema and Fido. Their relationship had, it seemed, quite a buzz to it on several levels – if the photographic evidence was anything to go by, the pair must have been caffeined up to the gills.
As with previous relationships of hers, including the one with Jonas, Taylor was evasive when the press questioned her. When MTV asked her if she was dating Gyllenhaal, she said: ‘I write in great detail about my personal life, but I don’t talk about it.’ Yet sources kept cropping up in the press. One, in Us Weekly, said Taylor was ‘smitten’ by Gyllenhaal. ‘She loves how nice and affectionate he is. Jake likes that Taylor is sweet, low key and very easy to be around.’
When he reportedly flew her to Britain, where he was deep in promotional junkets for his latest film, to spend a weekend with her, it looked serious. Some media claimed he spent £100,000 to whisk her by private jet across the Atlantic so they could spend just 48 hours together in his plush suite at The Dorchester hotel on the capital’s posh Park Lane. This made the relationship seem quite intense. Some even speculated that the couple would marry. Things were certainly moving very fast.
As Taylor was celebrating her twenty-first birthday, there were conflicting signals over where she stood with the Hollywood hunk. Some new stories had it that he had spent $11,000 on a vintage Gretsch guitar for Taylor. Others said he had spent £100,000 on a golden bracelet, which came with dozens of diamonds. To complete the reported gifts there was a coffee grinder and coffee maker, complete with Kona coffee beans. Such generosity, if the reports were true, hinted at a firm relationship with the two parties seeing a long-term future together.
However, when she joined 70 specially invited guests for a birthday party, Gyllenhaal was not among them. While work commitments could have explained his absence, it was notable that she spent Christmas with relatives rather than ditching them for Jake, as she had at Thanksgiving. Soon, it became clear the two had parted ways. ‘He said he wasn’t feeling it any more and was uncomfortable with all the attention they got,’ a source told Us Weekly. ‘He also said he could feel the age difference. Taylor is really upset. We told her not to move so fast with this, but she didn’t listen.’
Where had it all gone wrong? It seemed that the escalation in media attention he received as a result of being linked to Taylor had revolted Gyllenhaal and made him feel uncomfortable. He was no stranger to the press, of course, but he cherished his self-image as a credible actor who focused on indie films. Many actors like to aspire, at least in part, to the lifestyle and image of reclusive, mysterious thespians such as Robert De Niro. The more teeny, poppy image of Taylor, and the nature of the press coverage she consequently attracted, made him feel uncool.
Taylor noted his objections, but felt he was being oversensitive about the press. She told Vogue: ‘Also, I can’t deal with someone who’s obsessed with privacy. People kind of care if there are two famous people dating – but no one cares that much. If you care about privacy to the point where we need to dig a tunnel under this restaurant so that we can leave? I can’t do that.’ She would do more talking about what they went through together, but that would be done on her next album.
In the meantime, there were yet more awards to put on her sideboard. At the 2010 Grammys, she won Best Female Vocal Performance, for ‘White Horse’. This was a landmark moment in her career. ‘This is my first Grammy, you guys! This is a Grammy!’ She also won other gongs, including Album of the Year. She added: ‘All of us, when we’re 80 years old and we are telling the same stories over and over again to our grandkids, and they’re so annoyed with us, this is the story we’re going to be telling over and over again – in 2010, we got to win Album of the Year at the Grammys.’
An add
ed benefit of the evening was that she was uninterrupted as she expressed her gratitude. But just as she exorcised one awards-show demon, another popped up to take its place. It was her performance with country legend Stevie Nicks that became the most talked-about element of the evening this time. It brought on Taylor’s head the most hurtful criticism of her career to date. She sang a medley of ‘You Belong With Me’ and ‘Today Was a Fairytale’ alone and also performed a duet with Nicks on a cover of ‘Rhiannon’, the Fleetwood Mac track. Unfortunately, due to some technical issues, she was unable to hear her vocals as she delivered them. As she is used to having this as a guide, her voice lost its key and pitch.
Ironically, just weeks earlier she had spoken about how, to her, emotion was more important than perfection when it came to her vocals. She told the Los Angeles Times: ‘It’s really more about portraying the song in a way that gets the feeling across, rather than every phrase being exactly perfect.’ She added that, as a songwriter as well as a singer, she was more ‘obsessed’ with the meaning of her lyrics than the ‘vocal technique’ with which she delivered them. ‘Overthinking vocals and stuff – I never want to get to that point.’
This was a sentient point to make. In the era of the reality-television singing contest, the technical quality of vocal delivery has become an overrated beast. Hopefuls on shows such as The Voice and The X Factor are performing tracks written by other artists in order to please judges and the voting public. They can therefore focus too much on hitting every note perfectly, rather than connecting with the meaning behind the lyrics, which after all they did not write themselves.
However, the media was considering none of this as it reacted to Taylor’s Grammy performance. The Los Angeles Times said she had given a ‘strikingly bad vocal performance,’ which was ‘tinny and rhythmically flat-footed’. Entertainment Weekly said she was ‘badly off key’.
Among online and less mainstream publications, the voices were even harsher on Taylor. Scott Borchetta leaped to her defence. He said: ‘Maybe she’s not the best technical singer, but she is the best emotional singer, because everybody else who gets up there and is technically perfect, people don’t seem to want more of it.’ He added: ‘No one is perfect on any given day. Maybe in that moment we didn’t have the best night, but in the same breath, maybe we did. She’s a very intelligent girl. She’s going to keep addressing it and keep getting better.’
For her, the criticism had been painful. Later, she felt she could be vulnerable enough to open up to radio network NPR. She admitted the incident had thrown her. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘My confidence is easy to shake. I am very well aware of all of my flaws. I am aware of all the insecurities that I have. I have a lot of voices in my head constantly telling me I can’t do it. I’ve dealt with that my whole life. And getting up there onstage thousands of times, you’re going to have off nights. And when you have an off night in front of that many people, and it’s pointed out in such a public way, yeah, that gets to you. I feel like, as a songwriter, I can’t develop thick skin. I cannot put up protective walls, because it’s my job to feel things.’
Yet there were some positive observations. As Alan Light of SPIN magazine wrote: ‘The fact that it’s not perfect, in some ways, has been an asset. That makes it all the more believable to a certain point.’ But more importantly, perhaps, was the fact that she had won her first Grammy awards. As a Grammy-decorated act, Taylor was now among the most legendary artists in musical history. Not bad for a girl who ‘cannot sing’.
Success and recognition can dampen the enthusiasm of some musical artists. Once they have been bathed in those two elusive experiences, they often find that the incentive that once drove them has been placated. They therefore lose some of their motivation and go to ground temporarily, or even permanently. Workhorse Taylor is different. Success only drove her on all the more. ‘The second that I put out Fearless, the moment that album came out and I was done with it, I started writing for my next album,’ she said. ‘I love to plan 20 steps ahead of myself.’
She worked again with Nathan Chapman on this album, returning to her roots in that sense. They recorded most of the songs in Chapman’s basement. ‘A lot of times we got a magical first-take vocal and we would keep it,’ she said. As for the producer, he noted changes in Taylor and was the first to see how she had changed since Fearless. ‘She’s left home, she’s living on her own now and she’s seeing the world in a different way after growing up a bit.’
The album, Speak Now, had a broad and big sound to it. It opens with ‘Mine’. This song, she said, ‘is about my tendency to run from love’; a tendency, she said, that was a ‘recent’ development. The song is about ‘finding the exception’ to the temporary nature of her experiences with love up until then, she added. ‘I saw the entire relationship flash before my eyes, almost like some weird science-fiction movie,’ she told Yahoo! As Borchetta explained, it had been an exciting song for her and her crew to nail. ‘We probably played that song four or five times,’ he said. ‘I’m jumping around playing air guitar, she’s singing the song back to me, and it was just one of those crazy, fun, Taylor teenage moments.’
We can only speculate as to whom the song is about, but whoever it is, Taylor has said that the day the song was released he emailed her, having recognised that it was about him. ‘I had no idea,’ he wrote. ‘I realise I’ve been naive.’ He stands in a long list of men who have listened to Taylor albums only to realise one of the songs is about them.
Then we turn to ‘Sparks Fly’. This was a song that had been sitting on Taylor’s shelf for some years. It was only when she received positive feedback after live performances of it that she was drawn to record it. The album’s first big, slow epic is ‘Back to December’. ‘This is about a person who was incredible to me, just perfect to me in a relationship, and I was really careless with him.’ It seems likely this song is about Taylor Lautner. The physical descriptions in the song match the Twilight hunk neatly. She has also dedicated it onstage to ‘the boy from Michigan’ – his hometown.
In the titular ‘Speak Now’, Taylor sings about how she found out that her high-school crush had married someone who was treating him badly. ‘He had met this other girl who was a horrible person. She made him stop talking to his friends, cut off his family ties and made him so isolated. And, randomly, I was, like, “Oh, are you going to speak now?”’ This was in reference to the moment in a wedding ceremony when guests are invited to reveal if there is any reason why the wedding should not go ahead. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by that moment in a wedding, because I think it’s a metaphor for a lot of the times in our life when we’re just about to lose something, and that’s when we realise we have to speak up.’
The likely subject of ‘Dear John’ is country singer John Mayer, who had been linked with Taylor. A slow heartbreaker of a song, it is a ballad that grieves. ‘A lot of times when people’s relationships end, they write an email to that person and say everything that they wish they would have said,’ she explained. ‘A lot of times they don’t push send. That was a tough one to write and I guess putting it on the album was pushing send.’ Mayer was unimpressed by the perceived link to him. ‘It made me feel terrible – because I didn’t deserve it,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty good at taking accountability now, and I never did anything to deserve that. It was a really lousy thing to do.’ He described the move as ‘cheap songwriting’. When Taylor was confronted with his words on Katie Couric’s talk show Katie, she rolled her eyes and sighed, ‘Oh, come on.’
‘Mean’ is Taylor’s musical response to the criticism she received for that Grammys performance. ‘It’s a song I wrote on a really, really bad day, but it has produced so many happy days for me since,’ she said. As she explained, the Grammys fallout had reminded her of when she was abused by fellow pupils at school. ‘“Mean” is about bullying at a different stage in my life,’ she said. ‘I’m not at school and I still know what it feels like.’
Yet there was some
thing beautiful about how she turned the experience on its head, as she acknowledged to NPR. ‘The kind of magical way that criticism has helped me is that that’s another thing that I put into my music. I ended up writing a song called “Mean” about that experience, and about this one particular guy who would not get off my case about it. To stand up at the Grammys two years later, to sing that song and get a standing ovation for it, and to win two Grammys for that particular song, I think was the most gratifying experience I’ve ever had in my life.’ Just as she had previously found a bright side to the bullying she had received at school, so too did she find a positive from the Grammys horror.
With this song casting Taylor as the victim, she was anxious to address perceptions that she was oversensitive. She separated constructive, work-focused criticism from unpleasant personal attacks. The latter, she said, were ‘mean’. She added: ‘There are different kinds of ways to criticise someone.’ In any case, sensitive or not, her musical responses to bad experiences made for fruitful creative inspiration.
‘The Story of Us’ was a landmark track in the construction of the album. ‘After I finished that one, I knew I was done,’ she said. It was the last song she wrote for the album, and at that stage, she and Chapman danced around the room in celebration. However, the song itself is about a less festive feeling. ‘[It] is about running into someone I had been in a relationship with at an awards show, and we were a few seats away from each other. I just wanted to say to him, “Is this killing you? Because it’s killing me.”’ They never had that conversation, she explained, ‘because we both had these silent shields up’.
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