Who Is William Bowery?
Unless you’re Taylor Swift or Bowery, the answer to that question seems to be the equivalent of the shrugged emoji. Thanks to the remote nature of pandemic collaboration, including National’s Aaron Dessner, who produced and co-wrote 11 songs about the new Swift. Folklore album, and has been giving a satisfactory amount of information about the project’s creation process with her, she never met Bowery, who is credited with co-authoring two songs, “Exile” and “Betty”.
When Swift dropped the surprise on Thursday (July 23) that Folklore That night, Bowery was included on a list of “musical heroes” he named as collaborators: “@aarondessner (who has co-written or produced 11 of the 16 songs), @boniver (who co-wrote and was kind enough to sing on one with me), William Bowery (who co-wrote two with me) and @jackantonoff (who is basically a musical family right now), “he noted on social media.
Dessner spoke of Bowery in some interviews about the making of Folklore on Friday, but he hasn’t really revealed any clues to the composer’s identity.
“I haven’t really met him because of social distancing, which is kind of funny,” he said. Gallow, mentioning that he was in contact with Swift daily by text message or phone for three or four months while they worked on the new music. “I think he is a friend.”
TO Rolling StoneDessner reiterated: “He is a songwriter, and actually due to social estrangement, I have never met him. He actually wrote the original idea for ‘Exile’, and then Taylor took it and ran with it. I don’t know to be totally honest “
“I don’t know him completely,” she repeated, “other than that she wrote ‘Betty’ and ‘Exile’ with her. But you know she is a very collaborative person, so she was probably a songwriter.”
Swift said she adapted characters and intertwined her stories with hers in Folklore. “I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I never knew, people I know or wish I hadn’t known,” she revealed on Instagram on launch day. .
“An exiled man walking the cliffs of a land that is not his own, wondering how everything went so terribly wrong,” he said, apparently referring to “Exile.” Describing “Betty,” she wrote, “A seventeen-year-old girl standing on a porch, learning to apologize.”
Speculation is rampant among enthusiastic Swift fans that William Bowery is a pseudonym (a concept familiar to Swift, who is written under the pseudonym Nils Sjöberg). Dessner first denied this idea, then admitted that he really have no idea.
“No, no, no,” he said, when asked if Bowery is an alias. “I mean, I don’t know. She didn’t tell me there was a ‘Cardigan’ video until it literally came out, and I wrote the song with her. So I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure she’s a real songwriter.”
“She enjoys little mysteries,” Dessner noted.
