#well thank you william
“He was merely ‘messing around’ on the piano when Swift heard and walked over, intrigued. He had been singing the fully formed first verse to the song that became ‘Exile.’ (Bon Iver handles the male vocals on the final version.) ‘It was completely off the cuff, an accident,’ he says, shrugging. ‘She said, ‘Can we try and sit down and get to the end together?’’ And so we did. It was as basic as some people made sourdough. I press him on this point — he wrote an entire verse to a Taylor Swift song without trying? ‘Who doesn’t walk around the house singing?’ he asks. I explain that it’s unusual for hit songs to spring forth like that from nonmusicians’ heads. He says he wasn’t trying to write to Swift’s personal sound but had been listening to a lot of the National (Aaron Dessner ended up producing the album). Alwyn wrote the chorus for ‘Betty’ just as casually, albeit less soberly: ‘I’d probably had a drink and was just stumbling around the house. We couldn’t decide on a film to watch that night, and she was like, ‘Do you want to try and finish writing that song you were singing earlier?’ And so we got a guitar and did that.’
— Joe Alwyn to Vulture on writing exile and betty during quarantine (x)
