"Happiness," a breakout track from Taylor Swift's ninth album, Evermore, is anything but happy. It wouldn't be a Swift album without a couple of breakup ballads, after all. "There'll be happiness after you / But there was happiness because of you / Both of these things can be true / There is happiness," Swift croons in the chorus of "Happiness."
Evermore's seventh song, "Happiness," is about overcoming a breakup by learning to be happy for someone else. It is unlikely that "Happiness" is about any of Swift's exes, though. Instead, critics theorized that The Great Gatsby probably inspired it. "Seemingly named for Daisy's first words in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel ('I'm p-paralyzed with happiness'), the soothing ballad finds Swift stepping into the character's lovelorn shoes," Patrick Ryan wrote in USA Today, hours after the album dropped.
Swift even paraphrases one of Daisy's most famous lines: "I hope she'll be a fool — that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." Swift, in turn, sings, "I hope she'll be your beautiful fool. Who takes my spot next to you." Perhaps the most overt Gatsby reference, Swift describes a "green light" and a failed romance. "All you want from me now is the green light of forgiveness."
So there you have it, this one isn't about Joe Jonas. It's (probably) about Jay Gatsby.
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