Taylor Swift is spilling the tea about how her musical career is very entwined with her personal life.
The pop and country star took part in several interviews recently where she made jaws drop to the floor by confirming two major rumors that have been circulating online about her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, and Rihanna.
Swift confessed that the British actor is following in her footsteps and has been using a pseudonym to write hit songs.
The 30-year-old diva sat down with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner for Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions to talk about her music when she revealed that Alwyn used the name, William Bowery.
Bowery teamed up with Swift for her critically-acclaimed studio album Folklore. Swift confirmed that Alwyn did indeed contribute to her songs “Exile” and “Betty.”
The award-winning singer-songwriter made this revelation: “There’s been a lot of discussion about William Bowery and his identity ’cause it’s not a real person. So, William Bowery is Joe, as we know. And Joe plays piano beautifully, and he’s just always playing and making things up and kind of creating things…’Exile’ was crazy because Joe had written that entire piano part and was singing the Bon Iver part. He was just singing it, the way that the whole first verse is. So I was entranced and asked if we could keep writing that one. It was pretty obvious that it should be a duet because he’s got such a low voice and it sounded really good sung down there in that register.”
She revealed how being in quarantine with Alwyn led to them writing songs like “Betty” together: “I just heard Joe singing the entire fully formed chorus of ‘Betty’ from another room and it was just like, ‘Hello.’ It was a step that we would have never taken because why would we have ever written a song together?”
She added: “So this was the first time we had a conversation where I came in and was like ‘Hey, this could be really weird, and we could hate this, so because we’re in quarantine and there’s nothing else going on, could we just try and see what it’s like if we write this song together?’”
Swift recently addressed the claim that she penned a song for Rihanna. She told the legendary Paul McCartney that she did collaborate with her ex-boyfriend, Calvin Harris, for the 2016 monster hit “This Is What You Came For” performed by Rihanna.
Swift used the name Nils Sjöberg for the catchy tune. She told McCartney: “I wrote under the name Nils Sjöberg because those are two of the most popular names of Swedish males. I wrote this song called ‘This Is What You Came For’ that Rihanna ended up singing. And nobody knew for a while. I remembered always hearing that when Prince wrote ‘Manic Monday,’ they didn’t reveal it for a couple of months.”
The Beatles icon dropped this interesting tidbit about his career: “Yeah, it also proves you can do something without the fame tag. I did something for Peter and Gordon; my girlfriend’s brother and his mate were in a band called Peter and Gordon. And I used to write under the name Bernard Webb.”
Swift said that she took the decision to co-write with Harris using the made-up name because she wanted the attention on the music and not on her private life.
