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mercuryonparklane · 3 years

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An attempt at objectivity on the topic of Tayliz/a summary: Part 2

(Kind of...)

I’ve been busy with irl stuff the last week, so I haven’t been posting much lately. I finally have a day where I have nothing else to do and I’ve been considering making a post about where I currently stand on Tayliz/Gaylor in general for a while, so I thought now would be a good time to do that.

Disclaimer: I don’t know any of these people personally and this is all my own interpretation of publicly available information. I apologize for the length of this post...

I’ve been a Taylor fan since 2006 and a Gaylor since at least early 2009 when I was posting fanfics on LiveJournal (I stopped writing rpf a long time ago, btw). I’ve been in and out of the Gaylor fandom since then. I’ve created and deleted multiple blogs/accounts in the past 12+ years. I was mostly active between 2009 and 2015, but I did a lot of lurking during that time and only engaged when I felt I had something to contribute. 2015/2016 was a crazy time and I was going through some of my own stuff, so I stopped following Gaylor as closely for a while. I listened to reputation and Lover, I read the Gaylor theories, made a couple comments, and moved along. When folklore was released it drew me back in.

I created this blog in September 2020, before I even had an inkling that Liz might be more than just another name that has been thrown into the potential exes list, along with Claire C. and Kellie (I don’t believe either of those two had anything beyond friendship with Taylor). I had never looked into it too much because it seemed like there was not as much information as there was for the main 3 (Emily, Dianna, and Karlie). Now, after researching Tayliz for 5 months, I believe there is at least as much, if not more, to go on as there is for the main 3.

As for Taymily, I believe that, at the very least, Taylor had a massive crush on Emily. I don’t like to get too in-depth about that because there is a very suspect age gap. I’m not saying that those things don’t happen, but I will reiterate my statement from an earlier post that I am not comfortable essentially accusing someone of committing a crime when all that can be deciphered is that Taylor seemed to really care about her. I do think there are multiple songs about Emily.

I also believe that Taylor did date Dianna and possibly had some kind of relationship with Karlie. I think both of these possible relationships are long over at this point. Taylor may have been looking back on those relationships (along with others) in her last few albums.

I still personally think it is possible that Taylor is a lesbian, but there are reasons to think she might be bi and I understand why people think that she is. I don’t really talk about the guys Taylor may have dated, but I will say that, to me, all of the boyfriends she had after high school seem like beards. I could be wrong, of course. There are way too many signs that she is queer for me to not think that she is at least bi.

There have always been sapphic themes in Taylor’s music, even in early songs like “Me And Britney” and “Angelina”. Her entire discography is littered with sapphic themes. In recent years, she has seemed to hint at being some form of queer in other ways as well. This has all been examined by others, so I won’t get into that in this post.

Anyway, on to Tayliz…

There is some compelling “circumstantial evidence” suggesting that there may have been something beyond friendship between Tayliz (a lot of this was covered in my first post and all of the information has been mentioned at some point on my blog):

They met multiple times between December 2006 and February 2009, when Liz first performed with Taylor, but it is hard to tell how well they knew each other at that time. Based on the information available, I actually think they might have even been close, or at least friendly, before Liz was hired, but I could be wrong.

The “official” story is that Liz met Taylor at a meet and greet in December 2006 and again in July 2007. She asked if she could sing for Taylor and Taylor gave her advice, including suggesting that she enter a talent contest and that she should move to Nashville. Some accounts say that Liz sang for Taylor in her dressing room, but I have never found a source for this part of the story.

Taylor wrote the following sentence about Liz in her blog on February 5, 2008, after performing on the competition show that Liz was a contestant on: “It sounds strange, but there was always something different about her that stuck out in my mind”. That is super suspect to me...

Taylor was the only musician to perform on the show, btw (although they did have the touring cast of HSM on the next week). Taylor allegedly said, during the interview portion of her appearance, that she knew Liz and that Liz had gone to “all” of her shows and meet and greets… whatever that means.

According to Liz, she moved to Nashville in June 2008 and sometime within the next 6 months she received a call to audition as a backup singer, but did not know for which artist she was auditioning. I feel like it would be an incredible coincidence that Taylor suggested she move to Nashville two years earlier, they met multiple times after that, and randomly Liz got a call to audition for Taylor without knowing it was for her within 6 months of moving there. I don’t know, maybe I’m being too skeptical, but it seems almost more of a reach to say that Taylor didn’t somehow have a hand in her getting that audition.

Liz already seemed very comfortable around Taylor in that picture with George Strait taken on the day of her first show with the band in February 2009.

At the one-off shows after Liz joined the band, there was a little skit between Taylor, Liz, and Grant during YBWM, where Grant played the love interest and Liz played the “Cheer Captain”. There was even a talking bit. During the Australia one-off shows, there was a talking bit before F&A where Taylor introduced Liz and they had a little conversation that ended similarly to the one Taylor has with the interviewer during the Fearless Tour. After this, they rarely interacted on stage.

Taylor seemed to allow Liz’s input during the auditions for the Fearless Tour dancers, two months after she joined the band, and Taylor ended up hiring two of her friends.

Liz went with Taylor to visit Abigail at her university in Kansas two months after joining the band.

Taylor took Liz with her to see Britney Spears’ Circus Tour show in Chicago right after the Kansas trip.

Taylor said in an interview for Oprah’s website, released in May 2009, that Australia and Lawrence, KS were her two favorite places to visit, which just so happen to be two of the places she had recently been with Liz.

The fact that they shared a hotel room in London a few months after Liz joined the band. Caitlin, who had been in the band for a while at that point, and her mom were both there for that trip. Maybe Taylor was just happy to be able to hang out with another woman around her age. It seems strange, but it could be a completely platonic situation.

Taylor and the band, including Liz, recorded a cover of “American Girl” by Tom Petty (one of Liz’s favorite artists) in front of the Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon in May 2009. The secret message for “Sparks Fly” is “Portland, Oregon” and she mentions the Rose Garden in “The Lucky One”.

Taylor mentions going to dinner with Liz, seemingly just the two of them, in her vlog from May 29, 2009, which was around Liz’s birthday (May 27).

The amount of Liz content in the vlogs. Plus, the choice to put the line “I like where you sleep, when you sleep next to me” right before showing Liz sleeping on a couch (this was the trip where they shared a hotel room, which does make that fact more suspect, imo) and including the song “She (For Liz)” in another vlog, in which she dedicates a whole section to Liz’s habit of falling asleep “All. The. Time.”

In fact, in both of those vlogs, which were posted a year apart from each other (May 2009 and April 2010), Taylor wears a black dot shirt, in clips that include only her and Liz, that is similar to the one she wore in the IKYWT mv.

Honestly, just go watch the video she made for Emily and then watch the vlogs after Liz joined the band… I just get a similar vibe in the clips she chose to include of both women.

They went to a Paramore concert together the weekend before Taylor hosted SNL in November 2009. At the concert, they were filmed by other attendees dancing next to each other on the balcony. One of the songs they were filmed dancing to is “That’s What You Get” and Taylor asked Hayley to perform that song with her (and the band, including Liz) at one of the Nashville shows on the SN Tour in 2011. In November 2019, Liz released her own song called “That’s What You Get” that sounds like it could be the opposite side of the relationship much of Red is about (and a couple other Taylor songs from other albums).

In Taylor’s Glamour interview published on 10/5/2010, she mentions that she designed the two guest rooms at her Nashville condo with Caitlin and Liz in mind.

After tweeting about attending the Katy P. concert in Dublin with Taylor (and Grant and Caitlin) someone asked Liz what her favorite KP song was and she responded “Thinking Of You”. This is suspect because at the time Liz did have a bf, but she may have just liked the song and didn’t necessarily relate to it personally.

There are tweets from people who are either not really well-known or aren’t in the industry at all that mention Taylor and Liz hanging out outside of touring. They are mentioned together in quite a few tweets actually. They seemed to have a good number of mutual friends during that time (spring/summer 2009-fall 2012). After Liz left the band, Taylor stopped hanging out with most of those people, while Liz continues to maintain some of those friendships to this day. This could be explained by the fact that Taylor began spending less time in Nashville.

One such friend is the photographer who Taylor hired for Red. She is actually a longtime friend of Liz. Supposedly she took some photos of Liz that Taylor saw and Taylor hired her after that. There are some pictures from Taylor’s Red photoshoot that are similar to Liz’s photos.

There are rumors that Liz was fired, but the “official” story is that she left to pursue her own music.

Liz did not wish Taylor a happy birthday on twitter in 2012, which she had done in previous years. She did not tweet @ or mention Taylor for almost a year. Taylor didn’t respond to any of her tweets or mention her until October 2014.

Some of the songs Liz released in late 2012/early 2013 have similar lyrics/themes to Taylor’s music and may be about Taylor.

The lyric video for Liz’s song STFU&HM includes polaroid pictures with the song’s lyrics written on them and neon signs, which is basically the 1989 aesthetic. The actual mv has some potential parallels to the IKYWT mv. (side note: Liz specified in an interview that the kind of “sour candy” she is singing about in the song is Watermelon Sour Patch, which Taylor mentioned in the June 2008 issue of Teen Vogue was something that she “couldn’t live without”)

The love interest wears a key necklace in the STFU&HM mv and Taylor wears one in the IKYWT mv.

The bridge of IKYWT is very similar to lyrics from a song by Patty Griffin called “Nobody’s Crying”. Liz once said that Patty is her favorite singer (this was when she was still in Taylor’s band) and has mentioned her and that particular song multiple times over the years. Side note: Taylor mentioned last year that another one of Patty’s songs was the inspiration for “betty”.

Liz played the other woman in the mv for TSOU and in the photoshoot for SN. At the end of the mv for her song “H8U”, Liz interrupts her love interest’s wedding and kisses his tall, blonde, curly haired bride.

This one could be a crazy coincidence, but Liz recorded the backing vocals on a song called “Dear John” that was written by the backup dancer who came out to Taylor during the Fearless Tour. Btw, by no means am I saying DJ is about Liz because that would make zero sense.

Liz’s birthday is on one of the board games in the “Lover” mv that reference “Cruel Summer”. Most people think CS is about Karlie and that makes sense, but it also seems to reference “Love Story”, which was potentially written sometime around when Taylor performed on the show Liz was a contestant on. I don’t know if LS is about Liz and I am not trying to claim that, but it is interesting. Even if it’s not, they performed that song together a lot and Liz helped out with the onstage costume change during that song. CS could be about her experiences with both Liz and Karlie. Or it could just be about Karlie and the date in the “Lover” mv has nothing to do with Liz’s birthday.

In “the 1” and “dorothea”, Taylor potentially references Liz’s song “Never Know” and by reference, I mean that she essentially uses the exact same lyrics: “I guess you never know, you never know” = “I guess you never know, never know” and “I guess I’ll never know” = literally just the same line. Not to mention in “dorothea” Taylor also sings “Do you ever stop and think about me?” and in NK Liz sings “I wonder if you think about me” right before the line “I guess I’ll never know”. I am not saying that either of those songs are about Liz, but it is interesting, especially since Liz tweeted about “the 1”, which was the thing that really sent me on my deep dive into Tayliz.

The “cardigan” looks like the cardigan she wears in the first vlog she included Liz in. It could be nothing, but it is interesting because I have a theory that Liz is the first woman she had a “relationship” with and that “cardigan” is about Liz, Dianna, Karlie, and possibly some other women she might have dated/been with.

These are just some of the highlights and are more focused on the facts as opposed to some of my more tinfoil hat, fun, crack theory stuff or just some of the things that are loosely related to Liz or might involve a little (or a lot of) reaching to connect them to her.

Everything I have mentioned could just be a series of strange coincidences, even though there appears to be quite a few of them. Whether anything ever happened between them or it was just one of those intense, romantic friendships that some women tend to have, I don’t really know. Based on what I have seen, I tend to think there was something going on there beyond friendship, but possibly it was never anything official.

Liz seemed to have a boyfriend most of the time that Tayliz were working together/hanging out, which is one of the main things that makes me question my own theory. Of course, it is always possible that she had something with Taylor, while she also had a boyfriend. There are many reasons for that (poly, closeted, etc.), so that does not exclude the idea that she may have actually been involved with two people at one time and one of those people could have been Taylor.

If they were together in some capacity, while Liz also had a boyfriend, it could explain the messy relationship that Taylor seemed to write about during that time. I think it is possible that Emily was just a crush and Liz was her first actual experience with another woman where the feelings were reciprocated to some degree. OR they could have just been really good friends and I am utterly, completely wrong.

Maybe Taylor is just a straight girl, who doesn’t realize that she’s been sending signals that she is queer for years. Whenever that thought crosses my mind, I think about all of the things she has said and done that imply she may not be straight and I just can’t help thinking that it is intentional. I don’t think she is queerbaiting or unintentionally signaling that she might be queer. I think she is queer and has dropped multiple hints to suggest that over the years.

Anyway… Liz has a bf right now and seems to be in a good place, so let’s let her be, please. I hope we get some more new music from her soon.

As far as researching Tayliz goes, I’ll probably keep looking into it when I have time, but at this point I think I have seen pretty much all there is to see (of the content available online currently). I’ll be waiting for the songs from Taylor’s “vault” to drop to see if there are any potential connections there (at least in the “vault” songs for Fearless, Speak Now, and Red).

In conclusion (TL;DR)...

My personal opinion is that there is enough “circumstantial evidence” to include Liz on the list of Taylor potential exes. For me the Gaylor timeline looks something like this:

(Fair Warning: this is all total speculation based on song lyrics and other information that is publicly available)

Summer 2006-December 2007: Taylor develops a crush on Emily. Emily possibly finds out somehow and it doesn’t go over well (OR it does). She is fired from the band AND maybe she is paid off to pursue other interests…

2008/2009- Spring (Summer? Fall?) 2012: Taylor has an on/off relationship with Liz, while Liz also dates men. The relationship may have even started developing as early as the first time they supposedly met back in December 2006, but Taylor definitely was feeling something by the time she posted that blog in February 2008. It’s complicated and non-exclusive. Maybe Taylor wanted more of a commitment and maybe there were promises made that things could/would change, but they never did. By the time she started hanging out with Dianna she was ready to move on. So, she ended things in March/April… but still met up with Liz a couple times after (possibly as friends).

Taylor may have also dated Julianne H. at some point in 2008/2009.

Spring 2012-Fall 2013 (?): Taylor has an on/off relationship with Dianna that may have ended, in part, due to interference from Taylor’s team. Maybe it is the one relationship with a woman that could have actually developed into something more concrete, but maybe that also scared Taylor a bit.

Winter 2013/Early 2014-Fall 2016: Taylor has an on/off relationship with Karlie, while Karlie is also involved with Josh (hence my comment about how CS could be about her experiences with both Liz and Karlie because they may have been similar circumstances, where sometimes they were single and other times they had a serious bf).

Fall 2016-Present: There are at least a couple potential girlfriends within this timeframe. I lean towards Tily being a thing from at least fall 2016-Summer 2019. I am open to Zaylor and I do find it interesting, but I’m not as sold on that one. I personally do not think Taylor is with Joe nor do I think that Joe is WB.

The straight explanation could be that Taylor gets into really, intensely close friendships with other women and eventually they grow apart and move on with their lives.

The funny thing is that I remember Taylor once saying something about how after a breakup, she completely cuts that person off. That fits with her relationships (whatever the nature) with Liz, Dianna, and Karlie. With each of these women, Taylor shared a friend group with them, but Taylor seemed most interested in them. She has had a few friendly/cordial interactions with them, but she seems to have completely separated her life from them after their “friendships” ended. In fact, she moved to entirely different cities on opposite sides of the country (and in one case a different country, with a whole ocean in between) after she stopped hanging out with them.

That’s where I stand and it’s not really much different from where I was back in October when I posted my first summary on Tayliz.

Although, I do have more information now than I did then that leads me to think something was going on. 70% of the time I am convinced they had a relationship beyond friendship and 30% of the time I think they were only ever friends. 99.9% of the time I think I am a clown.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I am inclined to believe that Tayliz is more likely to have had some sort of relationship than Taymily and is slightly less likely to have happened than Swiftgron and Kaylor. Other Gaylors might think they were only coworkers or friends. I’m not out to convince anyone. I am just presenting the information I have found and I don’t mind a friendly discussion/debate if anyone wants to talk about it.

#tayliz #random tayliz thoughts #random gaylor thoughts

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mercuryonparklane · 3 years

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I just saw someone comment on a TikTok that the two women who host the Chatty Broads podcast have acted like they may have some negative tea on Taylor. I remember seeing that Liz is friends with them and was on that podcast once a long time ago (and, if I remember correctly (it’s been a while since I listened to it), she was very interested in one of their stories about a very confusing romantic friendship one of them had with another woman) .

So, I looked around a bit and one of the women (although I think it is the other one who is closer to Liz) posted this on her IG stories around May 3rd or 4th of this year:

Taylor and Liz seem to be on fairly good terms or Liz at least seems to be okay with Taylor, these days, but she may have felt wronged by something that went down, considering that she supposedly told fans that ran into her around Nashville that she would be on the next tour, which would have been the Red tour, up until close to the time the album was released and that Reddit comment about how Liz’s friends allegedly told that person not to ask her about Taylor and she said she was fired for getting out of control.

Back in May, though, Liz did a podcast interview where she basically admitted that she was partially at fault for whatever happened back then. Of course, she didn’t mention Taylor by name, but insinuated it was Taylor who sat her down and basically told her it was time to move on. I get the feeling that maybe Liz wasn’t exactly ready yet, but Taylor kind of pushed her out and Liz didn’t expect that, so I do think there may have been some bad blood there for a while. I also still think there is a chance that there was something more going on between them that may have added to some of the issue. Liz said she was partying a bit too much and wasn’t in a great place at the time. She said she was unsure about what to do and was kind of torn between staying in Taylor’s band and moving on to her own solo career, so it seems Taylor made the decision for her in the end. Again, I personally think there might have been something more there too, but I think at this point they are both mostly over it (and even if there wasn’t anything more than friendship, there still may have been bitter feelings about it on Liz’s part).

So is Liz one of the people that Bekah knows who was “100% screwed over” by Taylor? Possibly. Then again, she is only getting Liz’s perspective. She probably has way more insight into the situation than any of us do and can’t really get into it because she’d probably get sued. The whole bit about Bekah knowing people who worked closely with Taylor basically making it seem like Taylor isn’t a nice person could just be her own perspective and probably only based on things she’s heard about and not from any interactions with Taylor herself.

Liz and Taylor seemed really close for a while and Liz still seems to be okay with Taylor. She does seem to avoid talking about Taylor in interviews, but she has posted nice things on sm in recent years. Of course, she could just be playing it safe there (I think her posts about Taylor have been pretty genuine lately, though, especially the comment on that random IG post of Taylor’s Tiny Desk concert and her post about “the 1”). They may have had a falling out (platonic or otherwise), but that was so long ago.

Maybe Bekah knows some other people who worked for Taylor with stories of their own OR maybe Liz is just publicly playing nice when it comes to Taylor. “Bad Blood” might be about more than one person (Katy P., but also maybe Liz and/or Grant). Grant did post this in July 2014:

I can’t find the original post, but the “band-aids” caption months before “Bad Blood” would be released is interesting. I think the rumor is that Taylor fired (or at least did not rehire) him and Caitlin (I mean, I like her, but there wasn’t any fiddle on 1989 anyway) around this time. Maybe “Bad Blood” is about more than one situation… I mean there was this from Charity at that time too:

See my posts here and here about what Charity recently said in a podcast.

Anyway, I do think they were all close friends (maybe more in the case of Tayliz) and they may have been a bit blindsided when Taylor dropped them. Unfortunately, I don’t think Taylor is in the business to keep people on her team just to maintain a friendship. And that’s fine. Like people cut ties all the time in business, even when they really do care about a person, but I can understand them being upset about it too (and rightfully so because we really don’t know the true dynamic between them and Taylor). I also don’t think everything has always been totally Taylor’s decision either, but this post is getting long, so I’m not going to get too deep in those thought rn.

Anyway, whatever Bekah knows, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has something to do with Liz and if all you hear about a person is from one of your friends venting about them, then you may not end up with the best opinion of that person. I think there seemed to be a lot of good moments with Taylor and Liz (and Grant and Charity and Caitlin, etc.), but I think Taylor might have had a hard time separating personal and business relationships early in her career and she’s gotten better at keeping a healthy distance between herself and her employees since.

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