Taylor Swift's 10-minute version of All Too Well seemingly sheds light on why Jake Gyllenhaal ended their short-lived romance.
It has long been speculated that the emotional ballad, which first appeared on her 2012 album Red, was about the Brokeback Mountain actor, who she briefly dated for a few months in 2010, but this has never been confirmed.
On Friday, Taylor released her re-recording of Red, which features the long-awaited extended version of All Too Well, and the lyrics seemed to suggest that he cited their nine-year age gap as the reason for the split.
"They say all's well that ends well but I'm in a new hell / Every time you double-cross my mind / You said if we had been closer in age maybe it would have been fine / And that made me want to die," Taylor sings in the third verse.
In the fourth verse, she refers to the age gap again, by singing, "And I was never good at telling jokes but the punch line goes / I'll get older but your lovers stay my age."
The 40-year-old actor has been in a relationship with Jeanne Cadieu, who is 15 years his junior, since late 2018.
During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Thursday, the 31-year-old singer said she was most excited for fans to hear the 10-minute version as it's the song in its "original form".
"I showed up for rehearsals and I just was really upset, and sad, and everybody could tell, it was really, like, not fun to be around me that day," she said of recording it when she was 21. "So I started playing guitar and just kind of playing the same four chords over and over again. And I just started, the band sort of joined in, and I started ad-libbing what I was going through, and what I was feeling, and it went on, and the song kept building and building and building in intensity, and the song just went on for about, you know, 10 to 15 minutes of us doing this.
"The 10-minute version of All Too Well is what was originally written for the song before I had to cut it down to a normal-length song... That's what I'm most excited about, because it's the original lyrics."
Taylor has written and directed Sadie Sink and Dylan O'Brien in a short film inspired by All Too Well and it will premiere in New York and on YouTube on Friday.
