Taylor Swift has finally confirmed something Swifties discovered years ago: she wrote Calvin Harris and Rihanna‘s 2016 collab “This Is What You Came For” under the fake name Nils Sjöberg. She opened up about why she used the pseudonym in an interview with Beatles legend Paul McCartney, which was published by our sister site Rolling Stone on November 13. “I think when a pseudonym comes in is when you still have a love for making the work, and you don’t want the work to become overshadowed by this thing that’s been built around you, based on what people know about you,” the 30-year-old “Cardigan” hitmaker explained.
“And that’s when it’s really fun to create fake names and write under them,” she added. The 78-year-old British music icon then asked Taylor whether she had ever used one and if it was a “widely known fact.” She replied, “Oh, yeah. I think it is now, but it wasn’t. I wrote under the name Nils Sjöberg because those are two of the most popular names of Swedish males. I wrote this song called ‘This Is What You Came For’ that Rihanna ended up singing. And nobody knew for a while.”
The Grammy winner then added, “I remembered always hearing that when Prince wrote ‘Manic Monday,’ they didn’t reveal it for a couple of months.” Of course, this wasn’t the only topic Taylor discussed during the candid interview: she also opened up about her longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn. She revealed her British beau understands the demands of her hectic lifestyle.
“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,” she explained. Paul then asked Taylor if Joe could, “sympathize with that and understand” to which she replied, “Oh, absolutely.”