Who's really behind 'Jack Leopards & The Dolphin Club?'
Taylor Swift was "VERY STOKED" to hear one of her songs covered on the latest episode of Killing Eve -- but fans think there's a lot more to it than that!
A dark, bluesy rendition of the singer's 2017 hit "Look What You Made Me Do" played over the credits of the hit BBC thriller Sunday night, and Swift shared her praise for the track on Twitter.
"VERY STOKED about this cover of lwymmd on @KillingEve by Jack leopards & the dolphin club!!" she wrote.
The track generated plenty of buzz with Swift's fans, of course, who immediately took to the internet with their theories about how the singer might have had a bigger hand in the cover track -- and what it means in regard to her ongoing feud with Scooter Braun, Scott Borchetta and former label Big Machine over ownership of her master recordings.
For one, the band "Jack Leopards & The Dolphin Club" does not appear to exist beyond their cover of the song. They have no verified social media presence and no tracks on YouTube or Spotify beyond the "Look What You Made Me Do" cover posted Monday.
The cover art for the track is nondescript, a painted rendering of a blonde boy with a blue square -- inscribed with the words "Jack Leopards" -- blocking his face, and a striped T-shirt featuring the logo for the "Dolphin Club."
What's more, while Swift herself is named in the credits on the Spotify track as one of the writers of the original song, the producers of the Jack Leopards cover are listed as Jack Antonoff -- a frequent Swift collaborator -- and Nils Sjöberg, the pseudonym famously used by Swift when she secretly cowrote ex Calvin Harris' track with Rihanna, "This Is What You Came For."
In June 2019, Braun -- through his holding company, Ithaca Holdings -- purchased Big Machine Label Group for a reported $300 million. Doing so gave him the rights to Swift's master recordings that were made prior to her exit from the label in 2018 -- which includes Swift's sixth studio album, reputation, and "Look What You Made Me Do."
After the news broke, Swift took to Tumblr to blast the deal, claiming that she wasn't told about Braun's purchase before it became public and was never given a chance to buy her music.
"For years I asked, pleaded, for a chance to own my work. Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and 'earn' one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in," she wrote in part, before referencing Scott Borchetta, who founded Big Machine.
"I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future," she wrote.
In the ensuing months, Swift has continued to speak about her displeasure with Braun and Big Machine's ownership of her songs, slamming "toxic male privilege" in her Woman of the Decade acceptance speech at the Billboard Women in Music Awards in December.
"Lately there has been a new shift that has affected me personally and that I feel is a potentially harmful force in our industry. And, as your resident loud person, I feel the need to bring it up," she said. "And that is the unregulated world of private equity coming in and buying up our music as if it was real estate. As if it's an app or a shoe line."
The singer also announced her plans to re-record and re-release her old hits as soon as she was contractually allowed, so that she can have full control over her catalog.
"The reason I’m re-recording my music next year is because I do want my music to live on. I do want it to be in movies, I do want it to be in commercials," she explained in an interview with Billboard last fall, "but I only want that if I own it."
"It’ll feel like regaining a freedom and taking back what’s mine," she added. "When I created [these songs], I didn’t know what they would grow up to be. Going back in and knowing that it meant something to people is actually a really beautiful way to celebrate what the fans have done for my music."
See more on the ongoing feud in the video below.
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