Taylor Swift Confirms Boyfriend Joe Alwyn Is Secret 'Folklore' Collaborator!

Taylor Swift is confirming a heavily speculated fan theory.

The 30-year-old singer-songwriter revealed that her 29-year-old boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, is actually the “William Bowery” credited on her latest studio album during her Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions special that debuted on Disney+ on Wednesday (November 25).

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During the special, filmed in upstate New York in September alongside co-executive producers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, she opened up about Joe‘s contributions to her song “Exile” with Bon Iver and “Betty.”
“There’s been a lot of discussion about William Bowery and his identity ’cause it’s not a real person,” she explained.

“So, William Bowery is Joe, as we know. And Joe plays piano beautifully, and he’s just always playing and making things up and kind of creating things…’Exile’ was crazy because Joe had written that entire piano part and was singing the Bon Iver part. He was just singing it, the way that the whole first verse is. So I was entranced and asked if we could keep writing that one. It was pretty obvious that it should be a duet because he’s got such a low voice and it sounded really good sung down there in that register.”

She also talked about his contribution to “Betty.”

“I just heard Joe singing the entire fully formed chorus of ‘Betty’ from another room and it was just like, ‘Hello’. It was a step that we would have never taken because why would we have ever written a song together?” she said.

“So this was the first time we had a conversation where I came in and was like ‘Hey, this could be really weird and we could hate this, so because we’re in quarantine and there’s nothing else going on, could we just try and see what it’s like if we write this song together?’”

She also recently confirmed her own songwriting pseudonym when writing tracks for others.