Matty Healy Referenced Taylor Swift’s “Guilty As Sin?” Lyrics… Again
Am I allowed to cry?
Swifties aren’t happy with Matty Healy after the 1975 frontman seemingly teased them on X, formerly called Twitter. On Nov. 23, Healy tweeted about sending his Uber driver the song “The Downtown Lights,” and Taylor Swift fans are convinced that he was throwing shade by referencing her Tortured Poets song “Guilty As Sin?”
“I think I sent my last Uber driver ‘The Downtown Lights’. He didn’t think it was ‘coded’. He is employed tho,” Healy wrote on X, prompting Swifties to respond. “YOU HAVE A WHOLE FIANCE GROW UP,” one replied. (Healy is currently engaged to Gabbriette Bechdel.)
The same song — “The Downtown Lights” by Blue Nile — is mentioned in “Guilty As Sin?” Swift sings, “Drowning in the Blue Nile / He sent me 'Downtown Lights' / I hadn't heard it in a while.”
This isn’t the first time Healy has publicly posted about the song since TTPD’s release. On Nov. 18, Healy shared Annie Lennox’s cover of “The Downtown Lights” on his Instagram Stories. “If you don’t know this cover, you are welcome,” he wrote, per a screenshot shared by Page Six.
Healy has previously shaded Swifties. In June, he liked a post that criticized the “narcissism” of Swift’s fandom on Instagram. After one fan account questioned whether he posted a song on his IG Story as a “signal to Taylor,” a critic replied, “We need a new psychological term for a contemporary form of narcissism that is somehow not refracted internally onto the self but rather onto the object of a standom.” Healy liked a screenshot of the interaction.
Though he didn’t reference Swift by name, Healy was also openly critical of songs about “casual romantic liaisons” during an episode of Doomscroll in October. “Last year I became a way more well-known public figure for loads of different reasons,” he said at the time.
“I think that a lot of artists, they become very interested in their lore, or they become interested in the things that have happened outside of their art that people know about and they want to address that, and fair enough,” Healy continued added. “Honestly, I would kind of just be lying if I made a record about, I don’t know, all the stuff that was said about me or my casual romantic liaisons — or whatever it may be that I’ve kind of become known for just because I was famous.”
“That’s an obvious thing to draw from, and I’m just not interested in [it],” he added. “The idea of making a record about something that personally happened to me, that by the time I put it out is gonna be, like, two years old… I see people doing that as well, and it’s not interesting."
