“There’s been a lot of discussion about William Bowery and his identity. He’s not a real person,” Swift revealed in her Folklore: The Long Pond Sessions film. “William Bowery is Joe, as we know. And Joe, Joe plays piano beautifully, and he’s always just playing and making things up and kind of creating things.” Swift noted that the backstory of the name itself was more Alwyn’s story to tell than hers—and he’s finally telling it! Find out what “William Bowery” means and how Joe Alwyn and Taylor Swift chose it.
What songs did Taylor Swift write with William Bowery?
Taylor Swift and William Bowery wrote “Betty” together.
Swift revealed in Folklore: The Long Pond Sessions that she and Alwyn first collaborated on “Betty” from folklore, and that Alwyn came up with the song initially—and that she was surprised at how well they worked together. She recalled, “I just heard Joe singing the entire, fully formed chorus of ‘Betty’ from another room. And I just was like, ‘Hello!’ It was a step that we would never have taken, because why would we have ever written a song together? This was the first time we had a conversation where I came in and I was like, ‘Hey, this could be really weird and we could hate this, so could we just, because we’re in quarantine and there’s nothing else going on, could we just try to see what it’s like if we write this song together?’”
Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn (as William Bowery) co-wrote “Exile.”
In the Disney+ documentary, Swift revealed that Alwyn was also key in writing “Exile” for folklore. “Joe plays piano beautifully and he’s always just playing and making things up and kind of creating things,” she said. “And ‘Exile’ was crazy because Joe had written that entire piano part … He was singing the Bon Iver part, the ‘I can see you standing honey, with his arms around your body, laughing but the joke’s not funny at all.’ He was just singing it. And I was entranced and asked if we could keep writing that one.” Alwyn is also credited with two songs as William Bowery on evermore: “Coney Island” and “Champagne Problems.”
Why is Joe William Bowery?
Swifties quickly figured out that Alwyn was William Bowery, but Swift didn’t even reveal his identity to her other collaborators, including The National’s Aaron Dessner, until after the songs were done. On a May 2022 episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show, Alwyn revealed how he chose the moniker. “I did it under the name William Bowery,” he said. “Which sounds very fancy, like a kind of Agatha Christie character who should be wearing a monocle with a big mustache.” “It’s a combination of William, my great grandfather who I never actually met—was a composer and wrote a lot of classical music and he wrote a lot of film scores. And Bowery is the area of New York that I spent a lot of time in when I first went over there. [We just] stick ’em together.”
Why did Joe Alwyn use a pseudonym?
Alwyn explained on The Kelly Clarkson Show in May 2022, “We chose to do it so that people first and foremost would listen to the music before dissecting the fact that we did it together.” Next, trace Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn’s love story from beginning to now.
