Addison Rae Addresses Charli xcx, Taylor Swift Feud Rumors: ‘There Are People That Do Weird Things’

Addison Rae knows just as well as anyone in the industry that fame is a gun — especially when it comes to tensions between two well-known artists. And in a new interview with The Los Angeles Times published Thursday (Dec. 18), the TikTok star addressed one such rumored rivalry between her friend and collaborator Charli xcx and Taylor Swift.

When asked about the supposed beef between the two pop stars — who once hit the road together on Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour in 2018 — and whether she feels like she can avoid being pulled into discourse about “pop-girl rivalries,” Rae began by saying, “I guess we’ll have to see.”

“But there’s so much more to all these things,” she continued of whether she feels she “has to take a side” in the drama. “There are people that do weird things, and I try to avoid those people.”

Rae has long been friends with Charli, who was an early supporter of the social media phenom’s music career. The pair have collaborated on “2 Die 4” from Rae’s debut EP, AR, and on “Von Dutch” from Charli’s Brat remix album.

But while the British alt-pop pioneer and Swift have never publicly engaged with feud rumors, the speculation has been pretty much ongoing since Charli dropped Brat track “Sympathy Is a Knife,” on which she sings about feeling insecure in the presence of another woman in the industry. Some fans have perceived it as a diss track against Swift, whose The Life of a Showgirl song “Actually Romantic” has been interpreted as a response.

On the non-music front, some Charli fans have thought that Swift was purposefully trying to block Brat from the top of the charts in 2024 by releasing a limited U.K. version of The Tortured Poets Department. The Eras Tour headliner also used to date Matty Healy, who is in The 1975 with Charli’s husband, George Daniel.

“It doesn’t have to be a thing, but I get it — it’s entertaining,” Rae added to L.A. Times of artist rivalries in general. “Historically, there’s always been this friendly or maybe unfriendly competition between people. I think it’s a very natural human thing to want to exceed a standard that someone else has laid out. I’m not really interested it for myself.”

For the record, Charli has previously stuck up for Swift, telling off fans who chanted “Taylor Swift is dead” at the Brit’s show in Brazil in June 2024. And in August that year, the 14-time Grammy winner raved in a statement to Vulture: “I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011. Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. She just takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, and she’s been doing it consistently for over a decade.”

As for the “weird things” Rae has experienced in her own career by way of social politics, she told the publication, “Well, you know, this can be behind the scenes as well — producers and drama in writing and ideas and back-end conversations.”

“On my record [Addison] with [producers] Luka and Elvira, we had worked with someone — or tried to include them in something — and then we didn’t really feel like it was necessary,” she continued. “No bad blood. Then all of a sudden, this person had gone and worked with someone else, and things were sounding similar. The timeline of it all was very confusing and interesting.”