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“Back in the studio. “Uh oh . . .,” Taylor Swift tweeted Jan. 10. “Uh oh” is right. The missive probably caused every man the pop star has ever dated, spoken to or even walked by to sell all their possessions and hide in a decommissioned bomb shelter deep within the earth.
The 23-year-old singer, up for three Grammys at tonight’s ceremony, is known as much for hit records as her ever-growing wreckage heap of famous exes, about whom she then writes scathing revenge songs. Record of the Year nominee “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is a poppy, 3-minute, 13-second hateboarding that finds Swift callously dismissing a former flame who begs to patch things up.
(Could it be actor Jake Gyllenhaal?)
Another single off the triple-platinum “Red” album, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” contains the lyric, “Now I heard you moved on from whispers on the street/A new notch in your belt is all I’ll ever be.”
“Dear John” from 2010’s “Speak Now” appears aimed at infamous womanizer John Mayer, whom she briefly dated. “Dear John, I see it all now, it was wrong,” Swift sings. “Don’t you think 19’s too young to be played by your dark, twisted games?”
Mayer later told Rolling Stone that he was “caught off guard” and “humiliated” by the song. “I didn’t deserve it,” he said. “It was a really lousy thing for her to do.”
“There’s two ways to look at it,” says Dr. Dennis Lin, director of the psychosexual medicine program at Beth Israel Medical Center. “The less cynical way is that [she] may become infatuated very easily, but doesn’t have the tools or maturity to maintain the relationship.
“The more cynical point of view, as a sex therapist, is that maybe she’s doing this for publicity,” says Lin, adding that he’s never met or treated Swift. “I do believe she’s acting in good faith, but if she’s doing this for publicity, that’s someone with anti-social traits, sociopathic traits.”
Pop music’s most famous black widow comes in a surprising package. Swift is blond and pretty, but more cute than vampy, with bangs, ringlet curls, bright red lipstick and a wardrobe bursting with zippy sundresses and striped tops.
Her image, perhaps a leftover from scoring her first hit record at age 16, is chaste and non-threatening. She sometimes punctuates her lyrics, as well as her speech, with “like.”
It’s only recently that the perception of Swift has morphed from virginal to man-eater. After dating — among others — Joe Jonas and Taylor Lautner, Swift’s recent dalliances with political heir Conor Kennedy and English boy band member Harry Styles seem to have moved her romantic exploits into parody territory.
At last month’s Golden Globes, host Tina Fey jokingly warned Swift to stay away from Michael J. Fox’s son, adding that she “needs some ‘me time’ to learn about herself.”
A recent headline in the Onion: “Taylor Swift Releases New Breakup Song Slamming Winner of ‘Win a Date With Taylor Swift’ Contest.”
Even the polite and sweet Nashville crowd got in a few digs during November’s Country Music Awards, as host Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood riffed about the recent Swift-Kennedy breakup, quoting lyrics from “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”
“I usually find out when Taylor Swift breaks up with someone before I even knew they were dating,” tweeted Jack Osbourne’s wife Lisa last month. “That’s how fast these things happen.”
Swift recently set her sights on Bradley Cooper, voicing interest in dating the hunky actor through her friend Jennifer Lawrence. Cooper ran the other way, according to Radar Online.
It wasn’t always this way. Previously, Swift had been viewed as the innocent victim, a squeaky-clean, naive young woman who had been taken advantage of and done wrong by men. This victim perception solidified in 2009 during the MTV Video Music Awards when Swift was interrupted on stage by Kanye West while accepting her Best Female Video trophy. Swift looked like she was about to burst into tears. (Instead, she wrote a song about it, “Innocent.”)
The singer, who grew up in Pennsylvania with a younger brother before persuading her parents to move to Nashville at age 14 so she could pursue music, has often talked about being an outcast as a child.
“She got bullied a lot at school,” says Chloe Govan, author of “Taylor Swift: The Rise of the Nashville Teen.” “I think people didn’t like the fact that she was into music, and they thought she was a bit stuck-up.”
Her romantic troubles also began early. “Her first actual romance was when she was 13 with a guy called Troy, who was one of her best friends,” Govan says. “She took him for a long walk and told him there was someone else she wanted to be with. She dumped him for that person, only to find out that the other boy also wanted to be with someone else. She ended up with neither.”
A few years later, Swift’s high-school boyfriend supposedly cheated on her. Another left for college, earning him at least one song in the singer’s catalog: her first major hit, “Tim McGraw.” Legend has it Swift wanted him to think of her every time he heard a McGraw song.
Her first celebrity beau, singer Jonas, unceremoniously dumped her with a 27-second phone call in 2008. Gyllenhaal reportedly kicked her to the curb via text after two months because he was uncomfortable with the attention the couple was attracting. Swift once told Vogue in a not-so-veiled barb, “If you care about privacy to the point where we need to dig a tunnel under this restaurant so that we can leave? I can’t do that.”
She dated teen heartthrob Taylor Lautner for three months in late 2009 while the two filmed “Valentine’s Day.” Swift dumped him on Christmas Day, resulting in perhaps the only musical mea culpa she’s ever offered.
The lyrics to “Back to December” go, in part, “So this is me swallowing my pride/Standing in front of you saying I’m sorry for that night/And I go back to December all the time.”
Whether gentle or biting, Swift’s songs about heartbreak connect with fans. “If you’re going through something, there’s always something to pull out of her music that you can latch onto,” says Kimberly Ward, a 20-year-old North Carolina college student who helps run fan site Taylor Swift Web. “It’s highly relatable.”
Skeery Jones, a personality on the Elvis Duran and the Z100 Morning Show, says Swift’s music is on heavy rotation at the station and is often requested. “She speaks her mind,” he says. “She puts into song what other women feel when they break up with their guys.”
But even to fans, Swift’s recent relationships must seem a bit much. Last summer, she and Kennedy crashed his cousin’s wedding, then refused to leave. Swift also reportedly bought a house across the street from his family in Hyannis Port after just weeks of dating.
In the understatement of the year, Swift told Parade, “I don’t think there’s an option for me to fall in love slowly, or at medium speed. I don’t think it through, really, which is a good and a bad thing.”
As Swift’s public romances begin to overshadow her music, the question remains: Is the singer just a normal woman in her 20s playing the field or is something else going on?
Lin says it’s curious that Swift takes public revenge on her exes. “If you’re acting this way when you’re 16, that’s fine. But you shouldn’t be doing this when you’re 23,” he says. “She should be at a different level of maturity, focusing more on how she can learn from these experiences.”
Swift, however, has turned writing songs about old boyfriends into a trademark. She earned $57 million last year, according to Forbes. If she mellows out, or God forbid, finds happiness, fans may miss her blistering breakup ballads.
The pop star is reportedly upset with her reputation as a serial dater and plans to put romance on the back burner following her breakup with Styles last month.
Scuttlebutt is that she had already penned “I Knew You Were Trouble” while they were still together, and popped it on her latest album, “Red,” issued in October. That record included “Everything Has Changed,” a song she wrote about the day she met Kennedy.
Meanwhile the teen-gossip sites have already named “Taylor Swift’s next boyfriend,” adorable Jordan Witzigreuter, 23, a singer who records as The Ready Set. On Jan. 29, Witzigreuter wrote a song, “For the Better,” inspired by news of her breakup with Styles.
“I know you’re down in the dumps,” he sings. “But at least you’re rich, and your songs don’t suck/They say you’ll probably write him a song/Five times platinum, I doubt if they’re wrong.”
Swift responded by tweeting happy-face emoticons at The Ready Set’s feed. Though there’s no evidence that Swift and Witzigreuter have even met, at least one Swift follower wouldn’t mind if yet another churn-and-burn relationship resulted in a radio smash.
“If she wants to go from guy to guy, she’s doing it because she thinks there’s a reason,” says superfan Ward. “If I get a good song out of it, then I’m fine with it.”
reed.tucker@nypost.com