Phoebe Bridgers blacked out when she received a text from Taylor Swift asking her to collaborate on a song.
The Shake It Off singer released Red (Taylor’s Version) in November, with the album featuring all the songs on her original 2012 record Red as well as several unreleased tracks, including Nothing New.
Taylor reached out to Phoebe about appearing on the track via her co-writer and producer Aaron Dessner and the I Know the End singer freaked out.
“I remember blacking out reading the text because we’d never met or interacted in any way, so to be asked as our first interaction was crazy,” Phoebe recalled to The Guardian.
On Nothing New, the duo sing about ageing and no longer being the newest and youngest star in the music industry. Taylor, who originally wrote the song for the 2012 album, told the publication how she described the song to her duet partner.
“(It was about) my very first brush with the fear of ageing, irrelevance, and replacement. How young women are taught by society that our youth is a rapidly depleting commodity,” she shared, adding that Phoebe’s interpretation of it was “profound and insightful – she was talking about how not only do older men and culture fetishise a girl’s youth, but we in turn begin to internalise that ideology and genuinely believe it about ourselves”.
The unreleased tracks on Red (Taylor’s Version) also featured duets with Ed Sheeran and Chris Stapleton and the long-awaited 10-minute version of All Too Well.