Nothing could have prepared people for the anxiety and emotional turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It brought about life-changing and unexpected life events, and for Joe Alwyn, one of those events was making music with his now ex-girlfriend Taylor Swift during lockdown.
The Brutalist star looked back on this pivotal part of his life in an interview with The Guardian, discussing what it was like staying grounded despite the fame brought about not just by his career but also by his long-term relationship with arguably the biggest global pop star.
Alwyn and Swift dated for six and a half years after meeting late in 2016 at the MET Gala in New York. They split in April 2023. It was both have since moved on. And it was during their private moments during lockdown that they formed a fruitful pandemic partnership when they decided to work together on her albums.
The British actor made some significant — or shall we say award-winning contributions — to three of Swift’s albums. He co-wrote “Exile” and “Betty” from the 2020 Folklore album and “Champagne Problems,” “Coney Island,” and “Evermore” from its sister album Evermore.
Likewise, they collaborated on “Sweet Nothing” from 2022’s Midnights. All songs he wrote under the pseudonym William Bowery. Alwyn was also credited as a co-producer of Folklore, which sold over 1.3 million globally in its first week and went on to win Album of the Year at the 2021 Grammys.
Swift confirmed that William Bowery is Alwyn in her 2020 Disney Plus documentary Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions. The actor explained that they opted for the pseudonym (William after his composer great-grandfather and Bowery after an area in New York) to encourage people to listen to the music first instead of dissecting the fact that they wrote the songs together.
Despite jokingly called “The Tortured Man Club”), he still has fond memories of his music collaboration with Swift, which further heightened fans fascination on the actor.
“Lockdown was a whole host of surprises and that was pretty special,” he said in The Guardian interview adding, “That was not something I would have foreseen.”
Alwyn previously expressed his surprise to win a Grammy for Folklore in a 2022 interview with the publication, calling it a “surreal bonus of lockdown.” He shared: “That’s an understatement. It wasn’t like, ‘It’s five o’clock, it’s time to try and write a song together.’ It came about from messing around on a piano, and singing badly, then being overheard, and being, like, ‘Let’s see what happens if we get to the end of it together.’”
He ed it being “a lot of fun,” adding that “it was never a work thing, or a ‘Let’s try and do this because we’re going to put this out’ thing.” Instead, he likened it to “baking sourdough in lockdown” and the Grammy award being “a ridiculous bonus.”
But don’t expect Alwyn to be making music again, as right now his focus is on his acting career. The prospect of getting an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony?) was a topic on which he jokingly referenced: “Yeah, I’ll just breeze through those.”
Published: Jan 8, 2025 03:53 pm