Songfacts®:

• Gothic in both tone and lyricism, "My Tears Ricochet" centers around an acrimonious parting from a former lover/friend of Taylor Swift's. This person mistreated her, a fate she feels she didn't deserve. He continues to make life miserable for her even after she dies by showing up at her wake. According to Swift, the song is about an "embittered tormentor showing up at the funeral of his fallen object of obsession."
• Taylor Swift is addressing Scott Borchetta's betrayal of Swift after she left Big Machine records for Republic in November 2018. When music manager Scooter Braun bought her former label the following June, it gave him control of her back catalog, meaning Swift lost the rights to all songs on her first six studio albums. The songstress said she planned to re-record all her old records to devalue his purchase.
  
  And if I'm dead to you, why are you at the wake?
  Cursing my name, wishing I stayed
  Look at how my tears ricochet
  
  Speaking in an interview with Entertainment Weekly Swift explained that the breakdown of her relationship with Scott Borchetta because of his actions felt like the end of a marriage. "I think that happens any time you've been in a 15-year relationship and it ends in a messy, upsetting way," she said.
  
  As a result, while writing songs for Folklore, she was "very triggered by any stories, movies, or narratives revolving around divorce", despite never going through the process herself.
  
  Swift added: "So I wrote 'My Tears Ricochet' and I was using a lot of imagery that I had conjured up while comparing a relationship ending to when people end an actual marriage. All of a sudden this person that you trusted more than anyone in the world is the person that can hurt you the worst."
• "My Tears Ricochet" was the first song Swift wrote for Folklore, an album created in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Penned by the country-turned-pop superstar alone, she linked up with Jack Antonoff for this track's production. Antonoff took to Twitter to explain that this song and "August" are his "favorite things we've done together." And that's saying a lot, as the pair are serial collaborators - he co-wrote and co-produced 11 out of the 18 tracks on her previous album, Lover.
• Antonoff also sang the backing vocals on the song as well as playing percussion, bass, piano and electric guitar.
• This is the fifth song on Folklore. Swift traditionally places her most vulnerable and personal songs as track 5 on her albums; previous track 5's have been "Cold As You," "White Horse," "Dear John," "All Too Well," "All You Had To Do Was Stay," "Delicate," and "The Archer."
• Swift revealed to Entertainment Weekly that she wrote some of the first lyrics to "My Tears Ricochet" after watching Noah Baumbach's 2019 film Marriage Story "and hearing about when marriages go wrong and end in such a catastrophic way."
• The first trailer for the 2024 film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's novel It Ends With Us features "My Tears Ricochet." The movie stars Blake Lively as Lily Bloom, a woman who becomes entangled in a passionate but troubled relationship with a neurosurgeon. Lively is close friends with Swift.