All you people, can’t you see how being a fan of the Backstreet Boys is affecting Taylor Swift’s reality?
After AJ McLean shared a medley of the band’s “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” mashed up with Swift’s “Elizabeth Taylor,” fellow performer Nick Carter made up a dance to it.
“EVERYBODY’s gotta love this mashup! We know we do @TaylorSwift,” a Thursday, October 23, Instagram post read.
Swift, 35, herself saw the video and was the first in the comments section, writing in all-caps to fittingly express her appropriate level of excitement.
Taylor Swift has heard the mashup of her song “Elizabeth Taylor” and the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” — and she heartily approves. After BSB member AJ McLean posted a snippet of himself recreating the band’s original music video to the mashup, Swift, 35, shared her excitement in the comments section. “OH HI AJ OH […]
“OH, THE SQUEAL,” Swift replied. “I JUST SQUEALT.”
Carter, 45, subsequently reposted the clip onto his Instagram Stories, screenshotting Swift’s kind remarks.
Earlier this week, Swift was similarly impressed when McLean, 47, shared footage of himself singing the mashup of “Everybody” and “Elizabeth Taylor.” (The combined song was originally created by Lydia Getachew on SoundCloud.)
“OH HI AJ OH MY GOD,” Swift wrote via TikTok comment.
McLean, Carter and their BSB bandmates — Howie Dorough, Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson — released “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” in 1997. The song was cowritten by Max Martin, who also produced Swift’s “Elizabeth Taylor” and the entirety of her The Life of a Showgirl record alongside the pop star and Shellback.
Swift released Showgirl, her 12th studio album, earlier this month, featuring a track named after famed actress Elizabeth Taylor.
“I think one of the most random places I came up with an idea for a song for this album was the song ‘Elizabeth Taylor,’” Swift recalled in a TikTok video shared via Pandora’s account. “My parents sent me this clip of Elizabeth Taylor’s son saying something very flattering that, basically, if there was one person he might compare to his mother in modern day in terms of the personal and the whole chaos going on around us, he said he would say me.”
She continued, “When I read it, I just immediately started talking to Travis [Kelce, my fiancé] about it. I was just going on and on about Elizabeth Taylor, like, talking about all the things about her that I love [and] all the things that made her so glamorous and funny and witty and interesting, and how she kept challenging herself late into her life.”
While Taylor died in 2011 at the age of 79, her son Christopher Wilding has frequently praised Swift and her career achievements in the years since.
“I was, like, ‘One second, we’re parked [and] I have to get out of the car for a second,’” Swift recalled in the October clip, teasing how she told Kelce, 36, she needed to remember her song idea. “I just sang this melody into my phone, got back in the car and that’s what that’s like when that happens.”
Swift’s ode to Taylor is just one of the Showgirl songs that chart the Grammy winner’s romance with Kelce, who proposed in August.
“It’s got to do with fame, attention, love, notoriety [and] anxiety that this isn’t going to be forever, and how heartbroken would you be then?” Swift explained of the song’s origins during her “Release Party of a Showgirl” event. “The first line that I came up with was, ‘I cry my eyes violet, Elizabeth Taylor,’ and from that point on I was obsessed with this song. I wanted to tell a story that referenced some of the cool things about her life, but also are parallel to mine.”
She continued, “I used details from her life, but the feelings of what it conveys are things I’ve absolutely experienced time and time again. We really went in on this track, like, the production is something that I’m so proud of. It’s equally luxurious and feminine, and then goes really hard and really tough in the chorus. It’s one of my favorite songs.”