While Taylor Swift’s 10-minute version of “All Too Well” got the most attention of her new Red re-recordings “From the Vault,” the singer is rightfully putting the spotlight on another track, “I Bet You Think About Me,” which didn’t appear on the album originally. The song is full of cheeky jabs at an ex—seemingly Jake Gyllenhaal, the subject of “All Too Well,” who Swift dated for three months in 2010. On Sunday, Swift announced she was releasing a music video for the track on Monday morning.
In the song itself, Gyllenhaal gets some pretty overt lyrical shoutouts. Lines like “You grew up in a silver-spoon gated community / Glamorous, shiny, bright Beverly Hills” (Gyllenhaal was born into an industry family; his father is director Stephen Gyllenhaal) and “I bet you think about me when you’re out/At your cool indie music concerts every week” take aim at Gyllenhaal’s lifestyle. (Swift referenced Gyllenhaal’s music taste in “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” another track believed to be about him, too: “I’m really gonna miss you picking fights /And me falling for it, screaming that I’m right /And you would hide away and find your peace of mind /With some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”
Swifties saw the song as a clear Gyllenhaal diss track, and they had plenty of jokes to make about it when the song came out Friday. Swift spoke in 2011 about the track’s meaning. Billboard pointed out that radio station Country 102.5 shared an audio clip of Swift talking about creating “I Bet You Think About Me” to celebrate Red’s re-release.Swift said of the track, “This is a song I wrote with Lori McKenna, who’s one of my favorite singer-songwriters ever. I’d always wanted to work with her…I wrote this with her at her house when I was playing Foxboro [Gillette Stadium] on the Speak Now Tour. We wanted this song to be like a comedic, tongue-in-cheek, funny, not caring what anyone thinks about you sort of breakup song because there are a lot of different types of heartbreak songs on Red—some of them are very sincere, some of them very stoic and heartbreaking and sad—we wanted this to be the moment where you’re like, ‘I don’t care about anything.’ We wanted to kind of make people laugh with it, and we wanted it to be sort of a drinking song. I think that that’s what it ended up being.”
