Taylor Swift Shares She Was ‘Lonely’ While Working on ‘Folklore’ and Quarantining With Joe Alwyn

Taylor Swift has resumed her Eras Tour in Australia, and on Saturday night in Melbourne she opened up about her experience of creating the album Folklore. The Grammy winner was working on the record in 2020 and was quarantining with her boyfriend at the time, actor Joe Alwyn. Swift dated Alwyn for six years and he is credited on two songs from the album, “Exile” and “Betty.”

In a video clip captured by fans, Swift told the audience that she was still “lonely” during Folklore‘s production.

“[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,” she said of the process. “That was in my mind, what I thought I looked like writing Folklore.”

She added, “That is not what I looked like…So that’s all that matters—the delusion.”

The former couple were fairly private about their relationship, making few public appearances together and rarely talking about one another in interviews. After they broke up in early 2023, Swift went on to date Matt Healy, lead singer of 1975, and then NFL star Travis Kelce. Since embarking on a relationship with the Kansas City Chiefs player, Swift seems to have become much more comfortable with being public about her dating life.

After being named Person of the Year in Time Magazine, Swift explained her relationship with Kelce in the cover interview, saying, “When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m going to see him do what he loves, we’re showing up for each other, other people are there and we don’t care…The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone. And we’re just proud of each other.”