While you may know Taylor Swift as a princess of country music or for taking over the pop charts, what you don’t know about the famously private singer is that she’s a huge Thronie — and she takes her fandom quite seriously.
In a recent cover story with Entertainment Weekly, Swift revealed her deep interest in the show, working hard to avoid spoilers (a woman after our own hearts!), and how almost the entirety of her last album, Reputation, is based on GoT themes and characters. (If it seems absurd, that’s because it is.)
While at first she was just an avid fan of the drama, now she’s revealing how deep her love for the Throne goes. “So much of my imagination was spent on Game of Thrones,” she tells EW. “At the time, I was making Reputation and I didn’t talk about it in interviews, so I didn’t reveal that a lot of the songs were influenced by the show.”
She explains how Reputation is a “split” album between more “weaponized songs” about vengeance versus other, more loving sounds about finding “something sacred throughout all the battle cries.” Could it get any more Westeros-inspired?
“These songs were half based on what I was going through, but seeing them through a Game of Thrones filter,” Swift says. “‘Look What You Made Me Do’ is literally Arya Stark’s kill list. ‘King of My Heart’ was influenced by Khal Drogo and Daenerys. It’s even got this post-hook of drums — I wanted them to sound like Dothraki drums.”
Not only that, but several songs featured lines specifically tied to plot points from the seventh season. She explains how “I Did Something Bad” was written after sisters Arya and Sansa conspire to kill Littlefinger, and “Look What You Made Me Do” has clear Cersei and Daenerys vibes.
“My entire outlook on storytelling has been shaped by [Thrones] — the ability to foreshadow stories, to meticulously craft cryptic storylines,” she adds. “So, I found ways to get more cryptic with information and still be able to share messages with the fans. I aspire to be one one-millionth of the kind of hint dropper the makers of Game of Thrones have been.”
While the songstress hasn’t yet revealed her Thronie status to the show’s stars, she did let the series’ creators know how deep her love goes. When she first met D.B. Weiss and David Benioff at a party, she confessed. “I was sitting there going, ‘Do I tell them? Is that weird? No one asked for this information,’” she adds. “[But] one of the first things they said was, ‘Our daughters love your music.’ I’m like, ‘This is my in.’”
If you still have doubt of the plausibility of her inspiration, Swift does have a “long list of ex-lovers,” which seems like her own Kill List to me.
Photo: Christopher Polk/NBC
