What "Bad Blood"?
John Mayer would like to put an end to all the talk about him and Taylor Swift.
The two were rumored to have dated five years ago, and two songs later -- Taylor reportedly wrote "Dear John" about Mayer and he's thought to have written "Paper Doll" about her -- the 37-year-old singer/songwriter says he's ready to put their media-fueled feud behind him.
"Now I can just go, 'Look, I can say the name Taylor Swift.' She’s an artist. I'm an artist. Everybody stop, nobody's got cancer," he told Ronan Farrow during a MSNBC interview (starts around 8:30). "We're rich people who get to live out our dreams. Let's just stop it. I'm a musician who's bigger than one song or one record."
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Upon Farrow gently shifting the conversation to talking about Swift, Mayer encourages the topic, and talking about the 25-year-old singer "professionally." He even praises Swift for taking a stand against Spotify and removing her music from the music streaming service.
"Artists need the person with the loudest voice to speak for them,” he said of Taylor’s stance. "Now, some people who are cynical could say, 'You're helping yourself.' But it's trickle down. You're not saying, 'I want this just for me.' I think that's a really cool thing for a musician to do. Like two percent of the music industry has 80 percent of all the media about it. There's like four people who get all the press, and if any of those four people say, 'I want to speak for those people who would just never make this a story'--the only reason we're talking about Taylor Swift taking Spotify on is because she's Taylor Swift!”
As for the fact that Taylor gets more media attention than him, John is also totally cool with that.
"Nothing bothers me anymore," he said. "There are going to be times when I make music as popular or empirically valuable as [Swift's] in terms of making pop music that won't sell as many copies and I'm fine with that. Look, if I save a baby from a burning building and Kanye [West] saves a baby from a burning building, Kanye's going to get more Google News hits. And I'm fine with it."
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As for "Paper Doll," Mayer isn't pleased with how the track was construed. "The song never got listened to as a song," he explained. "It became a news story because of the lyrics. I’m not in the business of telling people what the song’s about."
What do you think? Is there "Bad Blood" between Mayer and Swift?
