Meet the inspiration for one of Taylor Swift's songs: her high school ex. It turns out "Picture to Burn" was about a teenage love gone bad, and the other party involved finally speaks out.
Many of Taylor Swift's songs have plenty of angst; it's in the lyrics, in the melody and the music videos. Even though most of the references are coded, some songs presumably talked about specific people in the artist's past. A friend speaks out about what "Picture to Burn" was really all about.
Taylor Swift went out with high school classmate Jordan Alford back in Hendersonville, until the latter dumped her to go out with classmate Chelsea; the pair is now husband and wife.
Daily Mail reports the backstory for some of Taylor Swift's songs, at least those early in his career. Chelsea Alford said it best in an interview:
"We were kind of good friends at school, later not so much. She dated him, that's why.
They dated in freshman year, but then after that, girl code, once you date an ex-boyfriend you're not friends anymore. 'Picture to Burn' is about him. Because he's always had big old trucks and stuff."
Taylor's friend told the Alford couple the song was about Jordan, but everything's water under the bridge now.
"At first it was kind of like, 'Oh, that's weird?'' You know. I was shocked, kind of like, 'Whoa, OK... well that's cool, what other ones are about us?'
But then it was kind of funny, it was so long ago now, who even cares. We just thought it was funny. [Jordan] was like, ''I'm not a redneck! She makes me look like some redneck!'' but other than that we just thought it was kind of funny."
It turns out Taylor's entire high school is intrigued by the singer's first album, tried to find out the people she referred to in her songs.
"We know other people she wrote songs about. That first record was a game, like, 'OK, which one is this about? OK, did they even date? No? that's weird.'
There were other songs on there about people that we talked about more probably, like 'Teardrops on My Guitar, about the guy she never dated, we were like 'that's a little odd'.'
She really does write her own songs, so I guess if you date her you have to know you're going to get a song written about you. In our case, back in school nobody thought she was actually going to go anywhere."
