Matty Healy Says Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ Almost Featured The 1975
Fans of The 1975 have a new reason to see Taylor Swift as a musical anti-hero. In a recent interview, frontman Matty Healy shared that his synth-pop band was almost featured on a version of the “All Too Well” singer’s blockbuster new album Midnights, but it never came to be.
Speaking with DTS Sound Station on KROQ-FM, Healy first revealed that Swift had heard some of The 1975’s new record, Being Funny In a Foreign Language, before it came out in October. Jack Antonoff served as producer on both Healy’s new record and Swift’s Midnights, which came out a few weeks after.
When asked if the Grammy-winning pop star had “returned the favor” by allowing Healy and his bandmates — Adam Hann, Ross MacDonald and George Daniel — to listen to an early cut of Midnights, the “Somebody Else” singer said that she’d actually gone one step further. “Yeah,” he said in a snippet of the interview, posted Monday (Nov. 28) to DTS’ Instagram story. “We actually worked a bit on that.”
“But then the version of it never came out,” he added, prompting some in the audience to vocalize their disappointment.
“No, no, no – that’s not how it works,” he said in response to some booing. “It was for reasons that are not to be criticized. She’s amazing.”
The revelation might come as a surprise to fans whose dreams of a Swift x 1975 collaboration were crushed prior to the release of Midnights. Healy himself had shut down rumors of the band’s involvement a couple months before the record dropped by confirming that a “leaked” tracklist — which showed his band featured on a nonexistent song called “In My Dreams” — was definitely false.
“I would love that! But unfortunately FAKE NEWS,” he wrote at the time, retweeting the faux list of song titles.
Watch Matty Healy talk about the Taylor Swift collab that never was below:
Hannah Dailey
Billboard
