The first song Taylor Swift collaborating with her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwynthe ballad appeared in 2020 Folk culture as a duet with Bonn Iver. At the time of the album's release, Joe was credited under the pseudonym William Bowery, although Taylor confirmed William and Joe as one of her Disney+ concert films, Folklore: Sessions at Long Pond Studio.
Taylor revealed Joe wrote the entire piano part, along with the vocals, “I can see you standing there baby/With your arms around your body/Laughing but the joke ain't funny.” She went on to say that The Favorite actor was “always just playing around, making things up and making things up,” but the pair might never have worked together if it weren't for the Covid-19 lockdown.
“I said, 'Hey, this might be really weird and we might hate this,'” she explains, “because we're in quarantine and nothing else is going on, we Let's see what it would be like if we wrote this song together?'”
The result of their professional collaboration? The album won Album of the Year at the 2021 Grammy Awards.
“We are very proud of 'Exile,'” Taylor said. “All I had to do was come up with some lyrics and come up with some heartbreaking, heartbreaking story to write with him.”
