Taylor Swift Slams Damon Albarn

Monday night at Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Hall, during a solo concert showcasing his new orchestral solo album The Nearer the Mountain, More Pure the Stream Flows, Blur/Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn addressed recent his controversial criticism of Taylor Swift.

The Britpop star’s claim in a Los Angeles Times interview — that the three-time Album of the Year Grammy-winner “doesn’t write her own songs” — had gone viral earlier in the day, after Swift put Albarn on blast, furiously tweeting, for her nearly 90 million followers to see, that his comments were “damaging” and “f***ed up.”

Onstage at Disney Hall, Albarn wryly told the audience that veteran journalist Mikael Wood, who wrote the L.A. Times piece, “cast me into the social media abyss.” It was in fact Wood that brought up Swift during the Times interview, but only to counter Albarn’s grumpy argument that most current-day pop artists rely too much on “sound and attitude” rather than on old-fashioned songcraft. It’s highly unlikely that Wood was the actual L.A. Times staffer who isolated Albarn’s anti-Swift remarks in an eyebrow-raising post on the newspaper’s official Twitter account — a tweet that caught Swift’s attention and prompted her indignant response.



On Monday afternoon, Swift angrily tweeted Albarn: “@damonalbarn I was such a big fan of yours until I saw this. I write ALL of my own songs. Your hot take is completely false and SO damaging. You don’t have to like my songs but it’s really f***ed up to try and discredit my writing. WOW … PS I wrote this tweet all by myself in case you were wondering.”