Although they’re both constantly in the public eye, Taylor Swift and boyfriend Joe Alwyn tend to keep the details of their relationship under wraps. It’s rare that we get a photograph of them together (they’ve never posted each other on Instagram!) and even rarer that they talk about one another publicly.
In 2018, Alwyn told British Vogue that he and the singer plan to keep their relationship as private as possible. “I’m aware people want to know about that side of things,” he said. “I think we have been successfully very private, and that has now sunk in for people.”
View this post on Instagram
All of this being considered, it’s a special treat when we do get a glimpse into their relationship, which is why the fact that The Favorite actor recently opened up about he and Swift’s songwriting process is so exciting.
Alwyn, 31, worked alongside the “You Belong With Me” singer on her Grammy Award-Winning album Folklore, which was released in July 2020. Together, the two wrote “Exile” and “Betty”—but you won’t find Alwyn’s name on the credits. That’s because he’s credited with the pseudonym William Bowery.
The actor told The Guardian that writing music with his girlfriend and winning a Grammy was “a surreal bonus of lockdown,” which he never expected.
“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.'” We love a creative couple!
“It was a lot of fun, and it was never a work thing,” Alwyn went on. “It was just like baking sourdough in lockdown. The Grammy was obviously this ridiculous bonus.” We certainly never got any awards for our sourdough, but then again, our sourdough didn’t include hits like “Betty.”
View this post on Instagram
The British actor was especially surprised that he won an award because he hardly ever considers the fact that his girlfriend is a superstar. “It’s not something I think about,” he explained. “Unless I’m in situations like this, and someone says, ‘What’s it like?’ and I have to think about to say about it. It’s just not for other people.” Fair!
Alwyn went on to confirm what we already know about his relationship with Swift: they want to keep their romance as private as possible. He believes that the more public they get, the more information people will seek out and expect from them. “I mean, I’m aware of people’s … of that size of interest, and that world existing. It’s just not something I particularly care about, or have much interest in feeding, I guess, because the more it’s fed, the more you are opening a gate for intrusion,” he explained. “I think that’s just my response to a culture that has this increasing expectation that everything is going to be given. If you don’t post about the way you make your coffee in the morning, or if you don’t let someone take a picture when you walk out of your front door, is that being private? I don’t know if it is. So I just don’t really feed that.”
That makes perfect sense to us! We just hope that, eventually, we can at least get a few more songs out of this duo. In addition to the tracks Alwyn cowrote for Folklore, he also collaborated with Swift on Evermore, her following album, which was released in December 2020. “Champagne Problems,” “Coney Island,” and the title track all contain credits to none other than William Bowery.
These days, though, Alwyn is focusing on his main career: Acting. His new show, a Hulu adaption of Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations With Friends, comes out next week. We suppose we’ll have to settle for watching Alwyn carry out fictional relationships while he keeps his real one under wraps.
