Selena Gomez Reveals This Taylor Swift Song Is About Her
These lyrics hit different now.
It’s no secret that Taylor Swift likes to take inspiration from her friends, family, and lovers when she writes her music, and although fans are adept at figuring out who each track may be about, it’s very rare for a muse to be officially confirmed. So, when Selena Gomez recently revealed that she actually is the protagonist of a beloved Swift song, years of fan theories were finally vindicated.
The song in question is “dorothea,” from Swift’s 2020 album evermore. When it was first released, there was a popular theory among Swifties that the track about a small-town girl who becomes a huge celebrity may be about Swift’s longtime bestie Gomez. Several details in the lyrics seemed to perfectly map onto Gomez’s life.
Her favorite movie was a kid was The Wizard of Oz, whose protagonist Dorothy may have inspired the name “dorothea.” Swift sings about Dorothea “sellin' dreams, sellin' makeup, and magazines,” which seemed to reference Gomez’s makeup empire Rare Beauty. And the song also brings up “your mom and her pageant schemes,” interpreted as a nod to the childhood pageants Gomez’s mother entered her into. Like Dorothea, Gomez is also from a small southern town, though Swift made Dorothea from Tupelo, Mississippi rather than Gomez’s hometown of Grand Prairie, Texas.
This theory was finally confirmed half a decade later during Gomez’s March 3 appearance on the Friends Keep Secrets podcast. “Well, ‘dorothea’ is about me, one of her songs,” Gomez said when asked about her connection to Swift’s music. “And I feel like a lot of moments — huge moments that were self-defining from relationships to family to love to hate, all of it in between, we were figuring it out because I was 15 and she was 18, and we didn’t really know what was going on. And so we’ve never seen each other any differently. So when I listen to it, I’m so impressed how it’s eloquently put.”
Not only that, Gomez also revealed there’s an unreleased Swift song that’s about her. “There’s this song Taylor wrote about us and it was called ‘Family,’ Gomez said. “It was over easily a decade ago. It was basically saying you have these amazing dreams, and now when I listen to that song it makes me want to cry because it has happened for us.”
