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Taylor Swift said she was “lonely” writing “Folklore” despite being in a relationship with Joe Alwyn during a recent Eras Tour date in Australia.
During the “Folklore” set of her Melbourne show Saturday night, the Grammy winner revealed she felt alone as she wrote the album while quarantining during the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.
“[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 in a fan-shared clip from the show.
“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.”
When she wrote “Folklore,” Swift, 34, was in a years-long relationship with Alwyn, 32. In fact, the British actor even helped pen some of the 2020 album’s tracks, including “Exile” and “Betty.”
The pair began dating in 2016 and kept their relationship extremely private, which the “Cruel Summer” hitmaker touched on in her 2020 interview with Paul McCartney for Rolling Stone.
“I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline to be commented on in tabloids,” she told the Beatles member after she praised him for living such a private life.
“Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with, when to not take a picture — the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain, but it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy.”
Swift and the “Conversations With Friends” star split in early 2023 after six years of dating.
“It wasn’t dramatic. [The relationship] just ran its course,” a source told us that April.
Swift has since changed her tune about how she wants to live her life.
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“Life is short. Have adventures. Me locking myself away in my house for a lot of years — I’ll never get that time back,” she reflected to Time during her 2023 Person of the Year profile last December.
“I’m more trusting now than I was six years ago.”
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The pop star has also become more comfortable putting her love life on display.
In September, Swift and Kanas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce went public with their relationship and have flaunted their love ever since.
Swift supported her beau, also 34, throughout the NFL season until his Super Bowl 2024 victory and the pro athlete flew thousands of miles to catch an Eras Tour show abroad.
Speaking of their decision to be open about their romance, Swift told Time, “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.”
Alluding to her last relationship, she added, “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.”
Swift announced her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” at the 2024 Grammys earlier this month and the Swifties presume it’s a savage nod to the group chat Alwyn shared with his buddies Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott.
During Friday’s concert in Melbourne, the “Anti-Hero” singer called writing the forthcoming project “a lifeline.”
“It sort of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through life and I’ve never had an album where I’ve needed songwriting more than I needed it on ‘Tortured Poets,’” she explained.
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