Real reason why Taylor Swift changed her name to secret pseudonym
Topics: Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Music
Britt Jones
Featured Image Credit: Thomas Niedermueller/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
Topics: Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Music
You may not know this, but Taylor Swift has a different name and its meaning is pretty cool.
This alias is something she came up with to credit her writing collaborations on other artist’s songs, more notably in Rihanna’s 'This Is What You Came For' hit.
The song was Scottish DJ Calvin Harris’s work which had the Barbados queen lending her vocals to the track.
At the time, Taylor was in a relationship with Calvin and the pair wrote the song together.
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Maybe writing her highly noticeable name on the back of the track would have brought too much attention to the pop star, instead of focusing on Rihanna?
Anyway, she ended up using the name Nils Sjöberg, an evidently Swedish name.
Nobody even hinted that this alias could have been Taylor, and she kept her lips locked for four years, long after her relationship to Calvin went up in public flames.
Years later, the 'Cruel Summer' singer revealed in an interview with Paul McCartney in Rolling Stone magazine that it was her own creation.
She shared that the pseudonym came from two names that were the most popular in Sweden.
She said: “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 singer added: "I think when a pseudonym comes along it's when you still have love for doing the work and you don't want it to be overshadowed by what's been built up around you, based on what people know about you. And that's when it's really fun to create fake names and write in your name."
However, she’s not the only one creating fake names to write music.
She recruited her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn to help her write some songs for her album Folklore.
In 2020, fans began to notice that the name William Bowery were on two song credits.
After some digging, they found out that Joe was related to someone called William and the couple were spotted going out the Bowery Hotel in New York City at the star of their relationship.
Once they put two and two together, all they needed was for Taylor to confirm the allegations herself.
Confirm them, she did.
During her concert film Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, Taylor said: “There’s been a lot of discussion about William Bowery and his identity, because … it’s not a real person. So, William Bowery is Joe … as we know.
“Joe plays piano beautifully and he’s always just playing and making things up and kind of creating things.”
He actually cowrote three songs on her Evermore record and he was listed on 'Champagne Problems', 'Coney Island' and 'Evermore'.
Joe explained on The Kelly Clarkson Show in May 2022: “We chose to do it so that people, first and foremost, would listen to the music first before dissecting the fact that we did it together.”