Averting a consumerist bloodbath that neither artist would have recovered from, Taylor Swift reportedly changed the release date of her latest album, evermore, as to not compete with fledgling up-and-comer Paul McCartney.
On Tuesday’s episode of The Howard Stern Show, Macca revealed that Swifty was originally going to drop her own LP on the same day as his experimental new record, McCartney III. “I did the Rolling Stone cover with Taylor Swift, and she just emailed me recently, and she said, ‘I wasn’t telling anyone, but I’ve got another album,’” McCartney told Stern. “And she said, ‘So I was going to put it out my birthday.’ And then she said, ‘But I found out you were going to put [your album] out on the 10th. So I moved it to the 18th.’”
Compelling stuff. But much like one of the many plot twists in McCartney’s 1984 crime caper, Give My Regards To Broad Street, the release cycle took yet another unexpected turn when Swift discovered that his album was actually coming out on the 18th—not the 10th, as she originally thought. So she had to switch evermore back to its initial date (it ended up coming out on December 11th).
“So I mean, you know, people do keep out of each other’s way,” McCartney continued. “It’s a nice thing to do.”
True. But let’s be real: both albums were going to do well regardless of when they came out (especially Swift’s), and even if they didn’t, something tells us that both artists would have come out on the other end juuust fine. While there’s something to be said for not stoking a rivalry—not to mention the artistic merit of both records—these are rich-people problems that the rest of us can only dream of having.
Watch the whole interview below:
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