Taylor Swift Confirms She Collaborated With Boyfriend Joe Alwyn on ‘Folklore’

Taylor Swift is confirming fan rumors that her boyfriend Joe Alwyn helped with her album Folklore. During her Disney+ special Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions that debuted on Wednesday, she confessed the identity of songwriter, “William Bowery” was actually Alwyn. Bowery is the one who’s credited on her latest album, but her 29-year-old boyfriend is the real writer.

The film was recorded in upstate New York in September with co-executive producers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. She also discussed that Alwyn contributed to her song “Exile” with Bon Iver and “Betty.”

“There’s been a lot of discussion about William Bowery and his identity ’cause it’s not a real person,” she said according to Just Jared. “So William Bowery is Joe, as we know. And Joe plays the 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,” she confessed.

“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,” she continued. “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.” Swift then addressed the song “Betty” and how she was curious to see where the two could take it, even though they had never done something like this before.

“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 explained before crediting the lockdown to the collaboration. “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’s latest album took many by surprise. With a much different sound than Swift is used to putting out for fans, she once again kept them guessing. Aside from Alwyn being a part of “Betty,” it was later revealed that it was her way of announcing Blake Lively and Ryan Reynold’s youngest daughter’s name. The two kept it a secret for months following her birth, but onlookers started putting two-and-two together and by the time Swift’s album was released, the news broke.