Did Paul McCartney inspire a track on Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’?

ABC/Heidi Gutman

Paul McCartney has inspired a lot of artists over the years, and it seems Taylor Swift is no exception.

Swift’s 2022 album Midnights features the song “Sweet Nothing,” which was co-written by her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, using the pseudonym William Bowery. Many fans believed the song was about Taylor and Joe’s relationship, but Taylor may have just dropped a clue that Paul was actually the inspiration.  

At least one eagle-eyed Swifty noticed that on X, formerly Twitter, Taylor “liked” a post from October 2022 shared by an account called Paul McCartney Archive. The post features a photo of McCartney with his late wife, Linda McCartney, and the text, “i would come back from a run with a poem to share and having listened linda would say ‘what a mind.'” 

That seems to be paraphrasing a poem Paul wrote for Linda called Blessed: “I would come back from a run/ With lines of poetry to tell/ And having listened, she would say ‘What a mind.'”

What does this have to do with Taylor? The lyrics of “Sweet Nothing” go, “On the way home/ I wrote a poem/ You say, ‘What a mind’/ This happens all the time.”

Fans now speculate that Taylor liking the tweet was her way of saying the song was possibly inspired by Paul’s relationship with Linda, which is often seen as one of rock’s greatest love stories. 

Taylor has, in fact, met Paul, who’s an idol of hers. The two interviewed each other for Rolling Stone in 2020. And Paul has said his 2018 song “Who Cares” was partly inspired by Taylor’s relationship with her fans.

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