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Taylor Swift Says She Was ‘Lonely’ While Dating Joe Alwyn and Writing ‘Folklore’ in Quarantine
Taylor Swift hinted that her relationship troubles with Joe Alwyn began long before their 2023 breakup. While performing in Melbourne on Saturday, February 17, she opened up about writing her 2020 album Folklore in quarantine.
“[I was] imagining that, instead of being a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair drinking my weight in white wine, I was a ghostly Victorian lady wandering through the woods with a candle in a candlestick holder,” Taylor, 34, told the crowd of 96,000 people. “And I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill. That was in my mind, what I thought I looked like, writing Folklore. So that’s all that matters. The delusion.”
The pop star had been dating Joe, 32, for more than four years when she wrote Folklore. In fact, the British actor was a cowriter on several songs, including “Betty,” which is the track that Taylor was introducing when she gave her telling speech in Melbourne.
Although Taylor and Joe didn’t split until the beginning of 2023, there’s recently been plenty of hints that they started having issues well before calling it quits. Taylor’s longtime friend and producer Jack Anotonoff revealed that the song “You’re Losing Me,” which is a gut-wrenching track rumored to be about Joe, was written in December 2021. The “Karma” singer didn’t publicly release the song until May 2023, weeks after news of her split from the Conversations With Friends star broke.
When Taylor announced her new album The Tortured Poets Department at the 2024 Grammys on February 4, she revealed that she’d been working on the record for two years. The titles of many songs on the album’s tracklist – including “But Daddy, I Love Him” and “So Long, London” – hint that TTPD will be a breakup record, so Taylor’s timeline seemingly reveals that she started writing breakup songs in 2022 while she was still dating Joe.
“Songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life,” Taylor said at her February 16, show in Australia. “I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets.”
TTPD will be released on April 19, and Taylor has plenty of opportunities to drop some more hints about the record before then. Her Eras tour continues with four shows in Sydney, Australia at the end of February, followed by six concerts in Singapore at the beginning of March.
The tour then takes a brief hiatus and will resume for its European leg in May.
