Taylor Swift famously almost never reveals who her songs are about, save for a few rare occasions where the inspiration is a little more sentimental. But now, one of her subjects is speaking out. Selena Gomez revealed that her longtime BFF Swift wrote the song “Dorothea” about her, as some fans have long speculated.
The actor appeared on the March 3 episode of her husband Benny Blanco’s Friends Keep Secrets podcast, where she opened up about her friendship with Swift. When Blanco’s co-host Dave Burd (aka Lil Dicky) asked about her connection to Swift’s music, Gomez said she “a million percent” felt her lyrics deeper than most fans, considering that some of them were written about her.
“Well, ‘Dorothea’ is about me, one of her songs,” she explained. “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 [together] because I was 15 and she was 18. We didn’t really know what was going on, and so we’ve never seen each other any differently.”
“Dorothea,” featured on Swift’s 2020 album Evermore, tells the story of a girl who left her hometown and made it big by “selling makeup and magazines,” from the perspective of an old friend who recalls their childhood memories and offers her a safe home to return to.
“When I listen to it... I’m so impressed how it’s eloquently put,” Gomez added about Swift’s lyricism.
But Wait, There’s Another Song
It turns out that “Dorothea” isn’t the first time that Gomez provided Swift with inspiration. She went on to reveal that the singer wrote a song “easily over a decade ago” named “Family.” While the track remains unreleased (or in Swiftian terms, in the vault), it tells the story of them accomplishing their goals together as friends.
“Insinuating in the lyrics, without quoting it, it’s basically saying, ‘You have these amazing dreams You want to be in movies,” she recalled. “Like, ‘In every crowd. I still see you.’ And then her part was, ‘You believe in my stupid dreams, playing stadiums.’”
While Swift could possibly release it as a “From the Vault” track, “Family” may also simply remain a gift for Gomez. “Now, when I listen to that song, both of those things — [it] makes me wanna cry — have happened for us,” she recalled, trying to hold back tears. “Back then, she was like, ‘I just wrote this song about us.’ It was just our story, kind of, and it was just the sweetest thing.”
