Taylor Swift has been extra chatty with fans during her last few Eras Tour stops in Melbourne, and opened up about writing Folklore while feeling “lonely” during quarantine. Which everyone is naturally reading all the way into due to Tay…spending quarantine with none other than her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn. (Who, reminder, everyone thinks Tay’s upcoming album Tortured Poets Department is about for approximately 1 million reasons including its verrrry 👀 release date.)
Time to Get Your PhD in Taylor Swift
Speaking to her massive audience on Saturday night, Tay said “[I was] imagining that, instead of being a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair drinking my weight in white wine, I instead was a ghostly Victorian lady wandering through the woods with a candle in a candlestick holder, and I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill. And that was in my mind, what I thought I looked like writing Folklore.”
We know Joe and Tay quarantined together thanks to his Instagram Stories from back April 2020, which featured her cat Benjamin Button hiding in a paper bag.
Tay surprise dropped the album just a few months after in July 2020—and Joe actually co-wrote some of the songs under the pseudonym William Bowery. Meanwhile, Tay told Zane Lowe during the release of her follow-up Evermore (which dropped a few months after Folklore in December 2020) that “Joe and I really love sad songs. We’ve always bonded over music. We write the saddest [songs]. We just really love sad songs. What can I say?..It was a surprise that we started writing together. But in a way, it wasn’t, because we have always bonded over music and had the same musical tastes.”