Taylor Swift’s Folklore writing sessions might have a correlation to the end of her relationship with Joe Alwyn.
During the Folklore section of her Saturday, February 17, concert in Melbourne, Swift, 34, revealed how she felt during her songwriting sessions.
“[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,” Swift quipped, per social media footage, while introducing her “Betty” performance. “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.”
Swift was dating Alwyn, 32, when she was putting together Folklore, the album that she released amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I wasn’t expecting to make an album. Early on in quarantine, I started watching lots of films. We would watch a different movie every night,” Swift previously told Entertainment Weekly in December 2020. “I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t seen Pan’s Labyrinth before. One night I’d watch that, then I’d watch L.A. Confidential, then we’d watch Rear Window, then we’d watch Jane Eyre.”
She continued at the time, “I feel like consuming other people’s art and storytelling sort of opened this portal in my imagination and made me feel like, ‘Well, why have I never done this before? Why have I never created characters and intersecting storylines? And why haven’t I ever sort of freed myself up to do that from a narrative standpoint?’”
betty speech you will always be iconic pic.twitter.com/erYdmyBect
— nich⸆⸉ eras gelsenkirchen (@sohighschooll) February 17, 2024
Swift spent the pandemic lockdown with Alwyn in London, alongside her three cats: Meredith Grey, Olivia Benson and Benjamin Button. Folklore, on which Alwyn cowrote songs under the pseudonym William Bowery, dropped in July 2020.
Swift and Alwyn started dating in 2017 and primarily kept their relationship under wraps, which she briefly alluded to in her 2023 TIME Person of the Year essay.
“Life is short. Have adventures. Me locking myself away in my house for a lot of years — I’ll never get that time back,” she told the outlet in December 2023. “I’m more trusting now than I was six years ago.”
Us Weekly confirmed in April 2023 that Swift and Alwyn split after six years together, with fans speculating that her album Midnights foreshadowed the demise of their relationship. Her next record, The Tortured Poets Department, is also presumed to be about the breakup. (Swift started working on TTPD as soon as Midnights, which came out in 2022, was completed.)
“I needed to make it. It was really a lifeline for me,” the 14-time Grammy winner said during her Friday, February 16, concert in Melbourne. “It sort of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through life, and I’ve never had an album where I’ve needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets.”
Swifties immediately theorized that TTPD is about Alwyn, an England native, because of the song titled “So Long, London.” Other track titles, including “I Can Fix Him (No, Really, I Can)” and “The Bolter,” sparked further speculation. (The Tortured Poets Department comes out on April 19.)
Swift has since moved on with NFL star Travis Kelce, whom she’s been dating since summer 2023.
