UPDATED: Zach Bryan has ghosted X (formerly Twitter), at least for now, after stirring up a hornet’s nest by tweeting out a preference for Kanye West over Taylor Swift — a post he subsequently apologized for, saying he was drunk at the time.
Although he has seemingly quit X, Bryan used his Instagram Stories in the wee hours Thursday morning to offer profuse mea culpas, saying, “I never want anyone to think I have a hint of malice or meanness towards anyone, ever. .. I’ve been going through a hard time in my own life and I think I was projecting a little. To be completely honest, it just came off as rude and desensitized to Taylor. I respect her so much as a musician that the last thing I want is people thinking I don’t appreciate and love what she has done for music.” He then twice repeated the phrase “Don’t drink and tweet!”
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The superstar singer-songwriter’s tweets sometimes go back and forth across the line between playful and outrightly provocative, and Tuesday night’s Ye/Swift tweet seemed clearly designed to get a rise out of people, however mirthfully it may have been intended.
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The original tweet first offered a mild diss of Swift boyfriend Travis Kelce’s football team — “eagles > chiefs” — and then followed that with “Kanye > Taylor… Who’s with me.”
Between Swift’s status as the most popular singer in the world and Ye’s as the music world’s most vilified antisemite, Bryan surely knew he was going to get a reaction, and he got one. Wednesday, he deactivated his account, but not before offering a mea culpa before going dark on the platform.
“Guys I love Taylor,” Bryan claimed in his followup tweet. He said he “was listening to TTPD [‘The Tortured Poets Department’] last night and ‘Thank You Aimee’ came on and I drunkenly tweeted that about Kanye. If anyone took it serious please know I love both artists a lot and think we’re in a really beautiful time of music.”
The Swift song referred to by Bryan has been widely seen as a diss track against Kim Kardashian, as a delayed response to the accusations that the reality star publicly lobbed at Swift in 2017, in defense of West, her then-husband.
Although he exited X, Bryan did not deactivate his Instagram account. There, he left evidence that his listening habits have been more consumed by Ye more than Swift, despite his declaration on the other platform that he’d been listening to “Tortured Poets.” On his Story, Bryan posted screenshots of three West songs he’d been calling up and apparently enjoying on Spotify, including “I Thought About Killing Somebody.”
But as the brouhaha about his comments continued to swirl even in his absence from Twitter, he returned to his Instagram Stories in the middle of the night Thursday morning to explain himself and apologize more fully — in text that spread across four separate images.
“For the record guys I wasn’t coming for Taylor the other night,” Bryan began. “I was drunkenly comparing two records and it came out wrong. I know there’s a lot of stuff that clouds around Ye and I was speaking purely musically. I love Taylor’s music and pray you guys know I’m human and tweet stupid things often. Hope one day I can explain this to her. Twitter gets me in trouble too much and I’d say it’s best I stay off it. I’m sorry to any Taylor fans I pissed off or let down. Love you guys and I’m trying my best!”
In a follow-up post, he wrote, “I’ve been going through a hard time in my own life and I think I was projecting a little. To be completely honest, it just came off as rude and desensitized to Taylor. I respect her so much as a musician that the last thing I want is people thinking I don’t appreciate and love what she has done as a musician. Okay, that’s the last of it! Love you guys and hope you guys understand. Don’t drink and tweet. Don’t drink and tweet!!”
He wasn’t done. “Not saving face here, but Taylor has been a force of nature for as long as we’ve all been growing up and I admire that. I’m gonna go listen to this record now” — accompanied by an image of her song “Castles Crumbling.” “I never want people to think I have a hint of malice or meanness towards anyone, ever, that’s why I’m saying all this. Everyone have the best day of all time, I love ya.”
Bryan added, “This year has been an awful lot on me in personal ways that no one knows and I’ve been trying to cope and balance too many things at once. So I’m going to take a breather from tweeting stupid stuff, finish my tour, and ground myself somehow in the midst of all this. I feel very, very blessed each day. Not taking it for granted and holding onto it has been so important to me. Okay, needed to get this off my chest, yall are the best and I’ll see you at Bourbon and Beyond” (an impending festival).
As of this writing, Bryan’s X page reads “This account does not exist,” although anyone who deactivates an account on the site has the opportunity to restart it within 30 days, and most fans assume the mercurial singer will be back.
Bryan may not be lying about actually liking Swift’s music, too, even if she did come up on the wrong end of the arrow in the Ye equation in his unsolicited comparison. He has posted in a more positive light about Swift in the past. In late 2022, when her album “Midnights” was coming out, he tweeted, “miss swift what are the vibes at midnight good morning everybody and happy almost sweekend, get in we’re going crying.” When a fan asked his favorite Swift song, he said, “‘August,’ for sure.”
Earlier in the week, Bryan stirred some controversy on X by suggesting a preference for artists not getting involved in making political stands, as Swift did when she endorsed Kamala Harris for president. “Anyone willing to put politics above music don’t get the point of listening to music,” Bryan tweeted. Many users responded by posting shots of classic protest songs by Bob Dylan and others.
Bryan and Swift share space in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 album chart yet again this week, with “The Tortured Poets Department” sitting at No. 5 after 21 weeks and Bryan’s “The Great American Bar Scene” at No. 7 after 11 weeks. Meanwhile, Ye’s latest effort is not sitting so pretty, so maybe he could use Bryan’s morale boost. “Vultures 2,” the hip-hop superstar’s latest collaboration with Ty Dolla Sign, is out of the Billboard 200 entirely, after six weeks out.
