Taylor Swift said she felt "lonely" working on her 2020 "Folklore" album while quarantining with actor Joe Alwyn, her boyfriend at the time.
The pop icon opened up about her emotional state during the COVID-19 pandemic halfway through her Eras Tour stop at Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne, Australia, on Saturday.
"[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. That was in my mind, what I thought I looked like writing Folklore," she said in a fan-captured video.
"And I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill," she continued. "That was in my mind, what I thought I looked like writing Folklore." The Grammy winner added, "So that's all that matters — the delusion."
Swift and Alwyn dated for six years. He is credited on two songs from the album, "Exile" and "Betty."
The former couple kept the relationship relatively private. They seldom appeared together publicly and rarely discussed each other in interviews.
After their breakup in April 2023, Swift dated Matt Healy, lead singer of the 1975, and later NFL star Travis Kelce, according to Elle.
Little has been said of the breakup with Alwyn, but fans have theorized that Swift's song "You're Losing Me," released in May 2023, has ties to the relationship.
The song delves into the heartbreaking experience of someone who gradually loses feelings for a romantic partner with lyrics like "I can't find a pulse / My heart won't start anymore for you / 'Cause you're losin' me."
According to Entertainment Tonight, Taylor allegedly initiated the end of the relationship.
"Taylor and Joe are in totally different places in their lives right now," an insider revealed. "It was more of Taylor's decision to break up, but both of them realized that they weren't completely right for one another. They had been together for such a long time and were spending so much time together, but their personalities were just too different. Joe is more introverted, shy, and quiet."