Phoebe Bridgers ‘Blacked Out’ When Taylor Swift Texted Her Wanting to Collab
Taylor Swift has influenced a generation of musicians who have come after her, including singer Phoebe Bridgers. Swift took note of Bridgers’ talent, and reached out to her to collab on a song together.
Phoebe Bridgers collabed with Taylor Swift on ‘Nothing New’ from ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’
In 2021, Swift released Red (Taylor’s Version), the re-recording of her 2012 album Red. In addition to new recordings of classic T-Swift songs, the project also contained unreleased songs that Swift had written years prior.
One of those was “Nothing New,” a collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers.
Phoebe Bridgers ‘blacked out’ when Taylor texted her about it
Swift reflected on her experience collaborating with Bridgers in a 2021 appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers. “Phoebe Bridgers is one of my favorite artists in the world,” she said. “If she sings it, I will listen to it. I love her voice and I also love that she’s a very funny person.”
When asked about how she reached out to the “Kyoto” singer, she said that she tried to be as chill about it as possible.
“I try not to cold call people,” she admitted. “I do send a very long text that i’ve crafted over many days, and I’ll send the song because I don’t want them to ever feel pressure to say yes to something creatively if it doesn’t go with what they want to do.”
“With Phoebe, I reached out and I sent her the song called ‘Nothing New,’ which I wrote when I was 22. It’s really, realy special to me because it was the first time I was not a shiny new artist,” she continued. “I sent it to Phoebe, and said, ‘It would mean the world to me if you would do this as a duet,’ because I really wanted another female artist who I loved to sing with me, because I think it has a very female artist perspective.”
“Her response was: ‘I’ve been waiting for this text my entire life,'” Swift laughed. “And I was like, ‘Yes!'”
Bridgers told The Guardian in 2022 about the life-changing text message. “I remember blacking out reading the text because we’d never met or interacted in any way,” she said, “so to be asked as our first interaction was crazy.”
The two worked together harmoniously
“Nothing New” explores Swift and Bridgers’ feelings as they navigate not being the newest and youngest stars in the music industry anymore. Swift spoke to The Guardian about how she described the song to her duet partner.
“[It was about] my very first brush with the fear of aging, irrelevance, and replacement. How young women are taught by society that our youth is a rapidly depleting commodity,” she said, calling Bridgers’ contributions “profound and insightful.” “She was talking about how not only do older men and culture fetishize a girl’s youth, but we in turn begin to internalize that ideology and genuinely believe it about ourselves”.
