Taylor Swift is getting candid on stage and admitting she felt “lonely” during her time writing folklore.
As captured by a fan video, Taylor Swift opened up about her feelings while working on folklore, her eighth studio album, which came out in the summer of 2020, during the Australian leg of her Eras World Tour.
“[While writing folklore, 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, and I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill,” Swift told thousands of concert-goers on Saturday, February 17, while onstage in Melbourne.
“That was in my mind, what I thought I looked like writing folklore,” the singer continued before adding, “That is not what I looked like, but it was what I thought I was like, so that’s all that matters, you know, it’s the delusion. I did something a little different on folklore. I decided that instead of a song about my own personal stuff … I thought I would create characters for the first time.”
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Why share this piece of information now? Well, because we know in Taylor Swift’s world, almost everything is some sort of clue or easter egg, some fans have put on their thinking caps to try and crack the code, and it all seems to go back to Swift’s former partner Joe Alwyn.
Before she began dating Travis Kelce, Swift was with Alwyn for six years, and he even co-wrote some of her songs under the William Bowery pseudonym, including “Exile” and “Betty” off folklore, as well as other songs from her ninth studio album evermore.
When Swift announced her upcoming 11th album, titled The Tortured Poets Department, during the Grammys 2024, many fans immediately thought the project would mainly take inspiration from Swift and Alwyn’s relationship and eventual split in 2023.
In the past, Alwyn admitted he found it “flattering” that Swift'd write songs about him. He famously served as inspo for her Lover track “London Boy,” and the TTPD’s tracklist includes a song called “So Long, London.” The album also contains not-so-subtle song titles, à la “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” and “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.” To top it all off, fans also found Alwyn has a WhatsApp group chat with Irish actors Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott called “The Tortured Man Club.”
So, was Swift’s message in Melbourne just a general tidbit about how she felt during the pandemic that she just now chose to share with fans, or was she giving us a hint as to what’s to come in TTPD? Only time will tell, but it is worth noting that Swift seems to be using the Australian leg of the tour to drop some important nuggets of information. On February 16, after making headlines for donating $100K to the family of the Kansas City Chiefs parade shooting victim, Swift also announced a new exclusive vinyl version of TTPD that will contain an extra bonus track called “The Bolter,” which fans are also theorizing could be about Alwyn.
