Matty Healy is completely focused on his romance with Gabbriette Bechtel and not ex Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, according to his aunt.
“He’s very happy in his new relationship so I’m sure he will be focusing on that,” Healy’s aunt Debbie Dedes told the Daily Mail on Friday, April 19.
Healy, 35, has been dating Bechtel since September 2023, keeping much of their connection private. According to Dedes, their bond likely won’t be tested by Swift’s TTPD and Healy wouldn’t be shocked to hear the pop star’s lyrical account.
“She writes about all her relationships, doesn’t she?” Dedes added. “I don’t think it will come as a shock to him at all. … He will not be surprised by the song. Him and her know what went on.”
Healy and Swift, 34, were first linked in 2014. Despite not officially getting together at the time, they reconnected in spring 2023 after the pop star’s breakup with Joe Alwyn. (Swift dated Alwyn, 33, for six years until news broke in April 2023 that they had called it quits.)
Us Weekly previously confirmed in June 2023 that Swift and Healy’s fling had fizzled out, with a source telling Us that things were “never serious.” The brief romance inspired many tracks on Swift’s TTPD, which came out on Friday, including “The Tortured Poets Department,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” “Down Bad,” “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” “Fresh Out the Slammer,” “Guilty as Sin?” and “Fortnight.”
Speaking on iHeartRadio in a prerecorded segment, Swift detailed how “Fortnight” — a duet with Post Malone — was conceptualized.
“Fortnight is a song that I think really exhibits a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album. One of which being fatalism, longing, pining away, lost dreams. I think it’s a very fatalistic album in that there are a lot of very dramatic lines about, you know, life or death,” Swift explained on the radio show. “‘I love you, it’s ruining my life’ — these are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say. But it’s that kind of album. It’s about a dramatic, artist, tragic kind of take on love and loss.”
She added, “‘Fortnight’ — I’ve always imagined it took place in this American town where the American dream you thought would happen to you didn’t, right? You ended up not with the person that you loved and now you just have to live with that every day, wondering what would have been, maybe just seeing them out and that’s a very tragic concept, really. So I was just writing from that perspective.”
Ahead of TTPD’s release, Swift gave Healy a heads-up about her musical inspiration.
“Matty’s family knew about the relationship and they were worried that Taylor was going to rip him apart,” a second source exclusively told Us earlier this month. “Matty has struggled with life in the public eye, and he’s been doing really well, but the last thing that he needs is for every Swiftie in the world to think he’s a villain.”
Swift has also moved on with NFL star Travis Kelce. Swift and Kelce’s courtship is highlighted on TTPD songs “The Alchemy” and “So High School.”
The Tortured Poets Department is available now.
