How Taylor Swift’s ‘Anti-Hero’ Lyrics Hint At Singer’s Insecurities

In 2022, popstar Taylor Swift released her hit single, “Anti-Hero,” from her tenth studio album, “Midnights.” The track was a commercial and critical success and debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

“Anti-Hero” gave fans a rare look at a very vulnerable side of Swift, who hinted at some of her insecurities through her beautifully crafted lyrics. The music video for the song was also controversial due to the presence of a scale for measuring weight.

Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” lyrics give insight into the singer’s underlying insecurities with one of her most personal songs yet.

Swift’s hit song takes fans through a tour of several things she does not like about herself.

At the beginning, she sings, “I have this thing where I get older, but just never wiser / Midnights become my afternoons / When my depression works the graveyard shift, all of the people / I’ve ghosted stand there in the room.”

The singer, through her words, paints a visual of how her depression is one of the things that keeps her up late at night thinking. In the music video, Swift also portrays a somewhat eerie scene as ghosts surround her and cause her to run.

Swift continues, “I should not be left to my own device / They come with prices and vices / I end up in crisis (Tale as old as time) / I wake up screaming from dreaming / One day, I’ll watch as you’re leaving /

‘Cause you got tired of my scheming (For the last time).”

The “Style” hitmaker subtly accuses herself of having a tendency to sabotage herself with all her “scheming.” She then goes on to further elaborate on this in the chorus of the song, as she sings, “It’s me, hi I’m the problem, it’s me / At teatime, everybody agrees / I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror / It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.”

At this point in the song, Swift seemingly admits to being her biggest critic while noting how much she struggles with looking at her own reflection in the mirror.

This lyric, which hints at Swift’s insecurities, is further emphasized in the song’s music video, as the singer is seen standing on a scale to weigh herself and then turning away from her reflection in the bathroom mirror.

The scene with the scale struck a chord with many because the word “fat” was written on the object at the time the music video was released.

Following the release of the music video for “Anti-Hero,” Swift was met with controversy due to the presence of a scale with the word “fat” written on it.

Some online critics felt the scene was “anti-fat,” while others noted that it only served to highlight Swift’s own insecurities with her body.

However, due to the backlash, the scene was removed from the music video. While the scale is still present, the part where Swift looks down to read the word “fat” has been removed.

Swift herself alluded to how the song hints at her insecurities in a video she posted following its release. At the time, she called the song one of her “favorites” ever and noted that she had never written about her insecurities with such detail before.

“I really don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before,” Swift said.

She continued, “I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized and not to sound too dark, but I struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person. This song is a real guided tour throughout all the things I tend to hate about myself.”

“And it’s all of those aspects of the things we dislike and like about ourselves that we have to come to terms with if we are gonna be this person,” Swift added, noting that she likes “Anti-Hero a lot because [she] thinks it’s really honest.”

In another very candid moment after the release of “Anti-Hero,” Swift opened up about a difficult moment in her career when she was at the center of controversy over an edited phone conversation she had with rapper Kanye West.

While talking to TimeMagazine, the singer discussed how West’s actions and those of his then-wife, Kim Kardashian, “took her down psychologically.”

“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” Swift told the publication.

She added, “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”

Swift recently released her eleventh studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” which sees the Grammy Award-winning star taking shots at her critics and even fans in songs like “But Daddy I Love Him.”

In the album’s tenth track, “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?” Swift gets very bold with her critics, seemingly singing about being toughened over the years due to harsh criticisms

“I was tame, I was gentle ’til the circus life made me mean,” Swift sings.

In another part, she tells listeners how difficult it would be to be in her shoes, singing, “I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me / You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.”