Eric Church revealed in a Rolling Stone interview that he was inadvertently dragged into Taylor Swift‘s lengthy legal battle over a lyric from her 2014 hit, “Shake It Off.” “In her deposition, when [talking about the line] ‘players gonna play, haters gonna hate,’ she says, ‘The first time I heard that phrase was in Eric Church’s song ‘The Outsiders,”” Church disclosed. “She was saying she never heard it on the [original song], which is what they were suing her for. And two weeks later, I got served by the people that were suing her!” Church recalls that he exchanged texts with Swift about the experience, “I was like, ‘Hey, thanks. Next time, let’s just skip that part?’ And she sent me a text: ‘I’m sorry. It’s the truth, though. That’s when I first heard that phrase.’” Swift’s lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed in late 2022, while Church went on to share that his own case has “since been settled. But I was like, ‘How did this even happen?’” (Rolling Stone)