Taylor Swift addressed her Nils Sjöberg pseudonym in a new interview with Paul McCartney.
On Friday (November 13), the “ME!” singer-songwriter sat down with the legendary Beatles icon for Rolling Stone’s “Musicians on Musicians,” the first in a series of new conversations between artists.
Together, both musicians poked each other’s brains on a number of different subjects, including making albums in quarantine, songwriting secrets and pandemic-era revelations they’ve learned about themselves in the time of COVID-19.
Another interesting topic discussed in the sit-down was when Swift casually spoke about writing songs under fake names, most infamously as the pseudonym Nils Sjöberg.
“I wrote under the name Nils Sjöberg because those are two of the most popular names of Swedish males,” Swift told McCartney. “I wrote this song called ‘This Is What You Came For’ that Rihanna ended up singing. And nobody knew for a while. I remembered always hearing that when Prince wrote ‘Manic Monday,’ they didn’t reveal it for a couple of months.”
For context, there was an entire conspiracy surrounding the mysterious songwriter in 2016. Swift co-wrote the song with then-boyfriend Calvin Harris, who more or less outed her secret identity on Twitter by confirming that she wrote lyrics and contributed some vocals for the track.
In a series of since-deleted tweets, Harris said that Swift “sings on a little bit of” the song, but clarified, “I wrote the music, produced the song, arranged it and cut the vocals though. And initially she wanted it kept secret, hence the pseudonym.”
As TMZ reported, it was acknowledged by both parties that the collab would be kept a secret because they didn’t want their status as a couple to “overshadow the song.” However, the outlet reported that when they broke up, the song played a contributing role in the fracturing of their relationship “because he disrespected her when the song was released.”
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