At a listening party in London, she told fans she wrote the song in 2020, and hinted “you can figure out who I was dating”. On I’ll Never Know Why, she laments, “When you left I lost a piece of my mind… how could you say goodbye without saying goodbye.”
Complicated sees her address her struggles head-on, from the “rollercoaster” of fame to being told, in 2015, that “I couldn’t have children” (she had a son with partner Chanan Colman in 2023). And she sends for Tatum, directly, too, when she sings “Met a Magic Mike will that ever be forgotten? Cause everything they write / That’s the headline and the topic”.
It would be easy to frame Jessie as an artist going uniquely scorched-earth – her fury perhaps sparked by Tatum’s new relationship with model Inka Williams, who is 19 years his junior – but she’s really just operating inside the new rules for women in pop.
Lily Allen, too, has spent the last several months on a full-blown revenge tour, narrating the ups, downs, and derailments of her (failed) open marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour in excruciating detail on her comeback album West End Girl. On Nonmonogamummy she sings: “I don’t wanna f— with anyone else / I know that’s all you wanna do / I’m so committed that I’d lose myself / ’Cause I don’t wanna lose you.” Once upon a time, pop stars protected their heartbreaks. Now they weaponise them.
