Taylor Swift is opening up her emotional state during the pandemic.
Halfway through her Eras Tour stop at Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne, Australia, on Saturday (Feb. 17), the 34-year-old pop superstar paused to reflect on being “lonely” while writing her 2020 album, Folklore, during the COVID-19 lockdown.
“[I was] imagining that, instead of being a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair drinking my weight in white wine, I was a ghostly Victorian lady wandering through the woods with a candle in a candlestick holder,” Swift said in a fan-captured video before performing her song “Betty.”
“And I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill,” she continued. “That was in my mind, what I thought I looked like writing Folklore.” The Grammy winner added, “So that’s all that matters — the delusion.”
While writing Folklore, Swift spent her time in quarantine with then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, 32, who helped the artist pen songs including “Exile” and “Betty. The “Cruel Summer” hitmaker reflected on how she and the British actor passed the time during the pandemic in a December 2020 interview.
“I wasn’t expecting to make an album. Early on in quarantine, I started watching lots of films. We would watch a different movie every night,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t seen Pan’s Labyrinth before. One night I’d watch that, then I’d watch L.A. Confidential, then we’d watch Rear Window, then we’d watch Jane Eyre.”
She added, “I feel like consuming other people’s art and storytelling sort of opened this portal in my imagination and made me feel like, ‘Well, why have I never done this before? Why have I never created characters and intersecting storylines? And why haven’t I ever sort of freed myself up to do that from a narrative standpoint?’”
Swift and Alwyn split last April after six years of dating.
Swift’s three-night stand at Melbourne Cricket Ground launched Friday (Feb. 16) and wrapped Sunday (Feb. 18). Next, she’s scheduled for back-to-back concerts at Sydney’s Accor Stadium (Feb. 23-25). Other international stops include Singapore, France, Sweden, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Europe and Canada.