Who Is Taylor Swift’s ‘Father Figure’ Song About?

Taylor Swift^[1] came out literally swinging on “Father Figure.” The George Michael-inspired track on her new album, The Life of a Showgirl^[2], finds her stepping into the role of a man who was once a literal father figure to her and singing double-take lines like, “I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger.” 

So who exactly is she singing about? Well, all signs point to Scott Borchetta, the record label executive who signed Swift to Big Machine Records when she was just 15 years old after watching her dazzle a crowd at the legendary Bluebird Cafe. But the hurt at the heart of “Father Figure” seems to stem from the bad blood that developed after Borchetta sold her music catalog to controversial music manager Scooter Braun, kicking off a six-year-long battle over the ownership of her music (and Swift’s “Taylor’s Version” re-recording process).

In 2019, Swift posted a lengthy explanation on Tumblr^[3] about the situation with her masters. She had several gripes, from feeling exploited by a bad record deal: “I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in,” she wrote. Her main issue was the deep sense of betrayal that Borchetta sold Big Machine Records, and all her music, to Braun, with whom she’d had past tension.

“Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter. Any time Scott Borchetta has heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to,” she added in the same post. “This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept,” Swift added. In “Father Figure,” the singer delivers a direct parallel to this sentence when she sings, “They don’t make loyalty like they used to.”

It’s not the first time Swift has addressed the deep sense of betrayal she felt by Borchetta. Throughout her discography following the 2019 sale of her music, the musician has written about the ordeal. Most notably, on 2020’s folklore and evermore. The former’s “My Tears Ricochet” paints the scene of her own funeral as a metaphor for the loss of her life’s work. In the bridge, she’s more direct when she sings, “And I still talk to you (When I’m screaming at the sky)/And when you can’t sleep at night (You hear my stolen lullabies).”

Meanwhile, on evermore, the imagery captures the situation with Borchetta more explicitly. On “Right Where You Left Me,” Swift sings about being frozen in time; on the bridge of “It’s Time to Go,” she details why. “He’s got my past frozen behind glass / But I’ve got me,” she says, referring to her first six albums. At the time, Swift was still in the middle of re-recording her music as a loophole to own it once more.

“Father Figure” finds Swift on the other side of the debacle. In May, the musician bought back her masters^[4]. By the end of the song, Swift flips the script when she switches from writing in Borchetta’s perspective and turns it back into her own narrative. Notably, she sings the Mob-esque line “I protect the family” six times, which could be a reference to those first six albums she recorded with Big Machine.

Now, Swift owns her own music and is focused on making her own decisions. As for Borchetta, he is currently the CEO of what is now known as Big Machine Label Group. He hasn’t commented publicly on Swift since 2020.