Taylor Swift released Taylor’s Version of her 2010 studio album, Speak Now, on July 7, and the song, “Better Than Revenge,” was missing a lyric from the original version. When Taylor first released the song, she sang, “She’s an actress, but she’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.” However, in the re-recorded version, the lyric now says, “She’s an actress, he was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches.”
The song was written following Taylor’s breakup from Joe Jonas in 2008. After the split, he began dating actress Camilla Belle, and the song has long been speculated to be about her. Ever since Taylor announced her decision to re-record her first six albums — a move made so that she could own the masters to those songs — fans have been wondering whether she’d keep the controversial lyric in “Better Than Revenge.”
The purpose of the re-records has been to keep them as close to the originals as possible, so fans will listen to the new versions instead of the old ones, which were bought by Scooter Braun and then sold to a private equity firm for millions of dollars. However, Taylor has obviously done a lot of growing up since she first wrote this track, and must have felt like the lyric had taken things too far.
Ahead of the Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) release, Taylor also commented on another buzzed-about song from the record, “Dear John.” Taylor penned the track following her 2009 split from John Mayer, and she recently performed it as one of the surprise songs on her Eras Tour. Before getting into the song while playing acoustic guitar, Taylor spoke to her fans about how she’s in a much different place now than when she first wrote “Dear John,” as well as the other songs on Speak Now.
“I’m 33 years old,” she said. “I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19 except the songs I wrote. I’m not putting this album out so you can go on the Internet and defend me against someone you think I wrote a song about 14 million years ago.”