Did Taylor Swift pine for Owatonna's Adam Young?

Star Tribune photo by Bruce Bisping

Everyone knows that Taylor Swift writes songs about guys who burned her. It turns out guys who burned her even if they didn't know it. Case in point: Owatonna's own Adam Young, a k a Owl City. They'd emailed, then they met at a New York club and apparently she was kinda interested (how did she communicate this?) and he apparently didn't follow through (we think he's still with his long-time girlfriend). How do we know this? Because "Haunted" on her new album "Speak Now" is apparently about her unrequited crush on Adam. The song is vague but Taylor has been known to drop hints. And music critic Chris Willman has gone to great lengths at Yahoo Music to decipher the clues that appear in the liner notes to "Speak Now." Here's the short version: In her printed song lyrics, she capitalizes random letters. But put them together and they spell a message. For instance, Willman found "CMT AWARDS" spelled out in the lyrics to "The Story of Us," which he concludes is about John Mayer because he and Taylor both attended this year's CMT Awards. Back to Adam and "Haunted." Willman decoded the clues to spell A-D-A-M. Between comments Taylor made to Willman in an interview and his own Internet research, he concluded that "Haunted" was inspired by her crush on Mr. Owl City. For those of you keeping score, Willman's decoding determined that "Last Kiss" is about Joe Jonas,and "Better Than Revenge" is about Camilla Belle, Jonas' post-Taylor girlfriend. "Back to December" is undoubtedly about Taylor Lautner. "Innocent" addresses Kanye West. "Mean" is supposedly about music-biz blogger Bob Lefsetz, a Swift supporter who ripped her live performance on the 2010 Grammys. Willman connects "Mine" to actor Toby Hemingway, who is in the video. And you don't need Willman's probing research to know about whom "Dear John" was written. But if you play the album backwards, you'll discover that...

Maybe Owl City's Adam Young didn't know that Taylor had a crush on him. Star Tribune photo by Marlin Levison