Why you gotta be so mean?
Zach Bryan insulted Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, on X (formerly Twitter) while he was allegedly drunk on Tuesday.
First, the 28-year-old country singer tweeted, “eagles > chiefs,” in reference to Kelce’s NFL team.
Bryan then took a side in Swift and Kanye West’s yearslong rivalry by tweeting, “Kanye > Taylor.”
“Who’s with me?” he concluded his post.
Unsurprisingly, Bryan faced immediate backlash from Swift’s massive fan base.
On Wednesday, he deleted his X account and issued an apology on his Instagram Stories.
“For the record guys I wasn’t coming for Taylor the other night,” Bryan wrote alongside a screenshot of Taylor and Post Malone’s song “Fortnight.”
“I was drunkenly comparing two records and it came out wrong,” he went on. “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.”
Bryan added, “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!”
On his next slide, which featured a screenshot of Swift’s song “The Albatross,” Bryan explained that he’s “been going through a hard time” in his life and was “projecting” when he tweeted about Swift.
“It just came off as rude and desensitized to Taylor,” the “Sun to Me” singer went on. “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 concluded that message by writing, “Don’t drink and tweet!”
Bryan shared a third post about Swift and called the 14-time Grammy Award winner “a force of nature for as long as we’ve been growing up.”
“I admire that. I’m gonna go listen to this record now,” he wrote with a screen grab of Swift’s song “Castles Crumbling” that features Paramore lead singer Hayley Williams.
“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,” Bryan added.
As Bryan referenced, Swift and West, 47, have had bad blood since 2009, when Ye infamously hopped onto the MTV Video Music Awards stage during Swift’s acceptance speech and declared that Beyoncé “had one of the best videos of all time.”
In 2016, West went on to mention Swift on his song “Famous.”
Swift asserted that she wasn’t informed about the “I made that b—h famous” line from the song. West’s then-wife, Kim Kardashian, posted what appeared to be the entire conversation on her Snapchat, which seemed to incriminate Swift.
In 2020, the real version of the call was leaked online by an unknown party and vindicated Swift.
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” Swift said about the incident to Time magazine after being named 2023’s Person of the Year.
She called the drama with West among the most “horrendous things that happened” to her.