The rumors are true! Taylor Swift confirmed that her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, cowrote two songs on her latest album, Folklore, under a pseudonym.
“There’s been a lot of discussion about William Bowery and his identity because it’s not a real person,” the Grammy winner, 30, said in her Disney+ special, Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, which premiered on Wednesday, November 25. “So, William Bowery is Joe, as we know.”
Swift explained to her collaborators Jack Antonoff and The National’s Aaron Dessner that the actor, 29, “plays piano beautifully, and he’s always just playing and making things up and kind of creating things,” including the “entire piano part” on her and Bon Iver’s song, “Exile.”
The “Shake It Off” singer went on to note that she and Alwyn are big fans of Bon Iver and that they were inspired by the Justin Vernon-fronted indie folk band before the collaboration was officially in the works.
“[Joe] was just singing it the way that the whole first verse is,” Swift recalled. “I was entranced and asked if we could keep writing that one.”
The Favourite star also played a role in the creation of “Betty.” Swift told Antonoff, 36, and Dessner, 44, that he helped write the country-inspired single after she heard him sing the chorus one day.
“It was a step that we would have never have taken, because why would we have ever written a song together?” she asked.
Almost immediately after Swift surprise-released Folklore in July, her eagle-eyed fans noticed that Bowery was not the name of a real singer or songwriter.
“WHO IS WILLIAM BOWERY TAYLOR??? IS IT JOE OMG IS IT JOE,” one Twitter user asked at the time. Other fans pointed out that Alwyn had a great-grandfather named William Alwyn, who was a composer.
News broke in May 2017 that Swift and the England native were dating. While they have rarely commented on their relationship, she said in her Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, which premiered in January, that she fell “in love with someone who had a really wonderfully normal, balanced, grounded life.”
A source exclusively told Us Weekly in March that the couple “have talked about marriage,” while a second insider revealed in August that Swift is “very excited” to start a family “when the timing is right.”
