Taylor Swift Talked To Paul McCartney About Her Boyfriend Joe Alwyn

The Musicians on Musicians feature in Rolling Stone gets a sparkly infusion from the seemingly random pairing of Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney in the December 2020 issue. On the cover, Taylor Swift is cosplaying Han Solo and working some Nellie Oleson bangs while Sir Paul makes a face that says, “I’m as confused by this pairing as you are,” and inside, Taylor talks to Paul about her boyfriend of four years, Joe Alwyn:

Tay Tay and Sir Paul talked about one of her songs from her cardigan called peace, and that’s when she brought up her boyfriend, the paps, and trying to get some “normalcy” in her life. Sir Paul going into detail about the time that Heather Mills poured water on his lawyer’s head would’ve been much, much, more interesting, but this is what we got instead, via Elle:

Swift told McCartney, when discussing “Peace,” that the song “is actually more rooted in my personal life. I know you have done a really excellent job of this in your personal life: carving out a human life within a public life, and how scary that can be when you do fall in love and you meet someone, especially if you’ve met someone who has a very grounded, normal way of living. I, oftentimes, in my anxieties, can control how I am as a person and how normal I act and rationalize things, but I cannot control if there are 20 photographers outside in the bushes and what they do and if they follow our car and if they interrupt our lives. I can’t control if there’s going to be a fake weird headline about us in the news tomorrow.”

McCartney asked Swift, “So how does that go? Does your partner sympathize with that and understand?”

She responded, “Oh, absolutely.”

Then she addressed just how the relationship has changed her, saying, “But 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. 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. That’s what that song ‘Peace’ is taking about. Like, would it be enough if I could never fully achieve the normalcy that we both crave? [McCartney’s designer daughter] Stella always tells me that she had as normal a childhood as she could her hope for under the circumstances.”

So I guess this means we’ll never get staged paparazzi pictures of Joe frolicking in the water while wearing an I Heart T.S. tank top.

While glittery morsels of Taylor’s love life and new music would be of greatest interest to her fetus-aged fans, who may look at the name Paul McCartney and think, “Is that Jesse McCartney’s dad?“, they also talked about the riveting word “marzipan” as they talked about songwriting:

Swift: Yeah, I have favorite words, like “elegies” and “epiphany” and “divorcée,” and just words that I think sound beautiful, and I have lists and lists of them.

McCartney: How about “marzipan”?

Swift: Love “marzipan.”

McCartney: The other day, I was remembering when we wrote “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”: “kaleidoscope.”

Swift: “Kaleidoscope” is one of mine! I have a song on 1989, a song called “Welcome to New York,” that I put the word “kaleidoscope” in just because I’m obsessed with the word.

McCartney: I think a love of words is a great thing, particularly if you’re going to try to write a lyric, and for me, it’s like, “What is this going to say to that person?” I often feel like I’m writing to someone who is not doing so well. So I’m trying to write songs that might help. Not in a goody-goody, crusading kind of way, but just thinking there have been so many times in my life when I’ve heard a song and felt so much better. I think that’s the angle I want, that inspirational thing.

One thing they have in common that was not covered, is the frightening tendency to attract overly rabid and invested fans, some of whom become stalkers. Well, over here, we’re just the harmless freaks who track their every move from a distance!

Pic: Rolling Stone