Paul McCartney says Taylor Swift moved her ‘evermore’ release date so their albums wouldn’t compete

They’re clearly besties now, since sharing the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
December 17, 2020 6:17 p.m. EST
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Well shake it off, baby! Swift and shout!  . . . wait, are we singing Taylor Swift or The Beatles? According to Paul McCartney, he and his Rolling Stone cover-bestie won’t mind if you sing both, because there is a longstanding, friendly tradition amongst musicians not to compete with each other. Case in point, Paul (don’t call him “the cute Beatle!”) called in to The Howard Stern Show to reveal that Taylor recently emailed him about her surprise album “evermore” to make sure her release date didn’t clash with the release of his latest album, “McCartney III.”

“I did the Rolling Stone cover with Taylor Swift,” he said over the phone to the notorious New York shock jock, “and she just emailed me recently, and she said, ‘I wasn't telling anyone but I've got another album,’ and she said, ‘So I was going to put it out on my birthday,’ which I think was the 10th. And then she said, ‘but I found out you were going to put it out on the 10th so I moved it to the 18th.’ And then she found out we were coming out on the 18th so she moved back to the 10th.”

“So I mean, you know, people do keep out of each other's way. That's a nice thing to do, you know?” He also revealed that, back in the swinging '60s in London, all the musicians used to do that for each other, like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, for whom Paul and John Lennon wrote, “I Wanna Be Your Man.” “The thing is, the scene was generous,” he admitted, speaking fondly of the Carnaby Street music scene. “We were all so excited that we were down in London, and we were all got recording contracts, you know? So it wasn't like any animosity. I mean, there is a rivalry, but it's not a bad one. It's kind of creative […] We would ring up the Stones and say, ‘When's your single coming out?’ They’d say, ‘Oh June 30th.’ ‘Okay well we'll put ours out July 30th.’”

Taylor and Paul previously both spoke in that Rolling Stone conversation about their admiration and appreciation for one another’s music, with the “Sgt. Pepper’s” brainchild even getting a shout-out on Taylor’s 2019, “London Boy.”

Speaking of “Sgt. Pepper’s,” Paul also told Howard Stern that his classic tune, “When I’m 64” off of the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was actually written when he was 15 sitting in his childhood home. It was only years later that he added the words.

“We had a piano in the house so I wrote the tune, I didn't write the words, those came later,” he admitted before humming along to the famous tune. You might remember Paul recreated that moment from his childhood for James Corden during his iconic 2018 Carpool Karaoke that took him back to his childhood home in Liverpool. [video_embed id='6216387498001']Before you go: Fans and critics alike are praising Taylor Swift’s ‘evermore’ [/video_embed]


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