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Taylor Swift‘s album folklore won Album of the Year at the 2021 Grammy Awards. Swift’s boyfriend Joe Alwyn co-wrote two songs on folklore, and Swift later credited him with co-producing six songs on the album. As a result, Alwyn was awarded the Grammy Award for Album of the Year as well. In an interview with The Guardian, Joe Alwyn called winning a Grammy Award a “ridiculous bonus.”

Joe Alwyn attends the Tom Ford AW20 Show at Milk Studios
Joe Alwyn | Mike Coppola/FilmMagic

Joe Alwyn co-wrote and co-produced songs on Taylor Swift’s album ‘folklore’

Swift released folklore in July 2020. Her main collaborators on the album are Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver is featured on the song “exile,” and he also co-wrote the song.

When folklore was initially released, an unknown songwriter named William Bowery was credited with co-writing the songs “exile” and “betty.” Swift later revealed in the concert documentary Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions that Alwyn is Bowery.

After folklore won Album of the Year at the 2021 Grammy Awards, Alwyn was credited with co-producing the songs “exile,” “betty,” “my tears ricochet,” “august,” “this is me trying,” and “illicit affairs” under his real name.

Billboard then reported that the Recording Academy “belatedly awarded” the Grammy Award for Album of the Year to Alwyn.

What Joe Alwyn thinks about winning a Grammy Award

To promote his upcoming Hulu series Conversations with Friends, Alwyn has taken part in multiple interviews over the past few weeks.

His work on Swift’s album folklore has inevitably come up, and in an interview with The Guardian, Alwyn went into detail about what it was like to write songs with Swift.

“I mean fun is such a stupid word, but it was a lot of fun. And it was never a work thing, or a ‘Let’s try and do this because we’re going to put this out’ thing. It was just like baking sourdough in lockdown.” Alwyn told The Guardian.

“The Grammy was obviously this ridiculous bonus,” he added.

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Joe Alwyn says his participation in making ‘folklore’ came from ‘singing badly’

Since Alwyn has been revealed to be Bowery, Swift has been complimentary of Alwyn’s skill as a musician.

“Joe plays piano beautifully and he’s always just playing and making things up and kind of creating things. And ‘exile’ was crazy because Joe had written that entire piano part,” Swift said of Alwyn in Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions.

Despite this, Alwyn did not speak highly of his own musical talent in his own interview with The Guardian.

“It came about from messing around on a piano, and singing badly, then being overheard, and being, like, ‘Let’s see what happens if we get to the end of it together,'” Alwyn said in the interview.

When asked about his interest in music compared to acting, Alwyn shared, “I like music, and I played a bit of guitar awfully in a school band when I was 12… I can play piano pretty badly, but never with the intent of, ‘Right, it’s time for my jazz-fusion album.'”