The queen of Easter eggs is none other than Taylor Swift. Fans of Taylor Swift have been working around the clock to find any new information about her upcoming 10th studio album, Midnights, which is set to be released on October 21. The artist, who won a Grammy, has been known to drop hints about upcoming music and other releases in her social media posts.
Swift uploaded a TikTok video on September 16 that was puzzling not because of the content of the video but rather because of the song that was used. The video, which she titled “The making of Midnights,” featured various clips of Swift in the studio recording the album with her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Swift captioned the video with the phrase “The making of Midnights.” On the other hand, she decided to use the song “Life You Lead” by Niceboy Ed for the post rather than one of her own songs.
You are not the only one who is curious about who Niceboy Ed is; in fact, you are not even close. “Life You Lead” is the first song that has ever been released by the unknown artist, and it was initially uploaded to YouTube just two days before Swift posted her TikTok video.
So uh, who is this guy? After the song was initially released, a Joe Alwyn fan account on Twitter created a thread in which they detailed one of their theories, which is that Ed is a friend of Alwyn’s. They wrote that “this guy Ed is one of Joe’s close friends and he released his first song,” and they went on to say that “there’s a lot of evidence of their friendship.” Later, the account uploaded a picture of Alwyn posing with a person they claim to be Ed, who is also a member of Alwyn’s friend group, which is colloquially referred to as the “Frosty Crew.”
One more theory suggests that Niceboy Ed is actually Alwyn himself, which isn’t too much of a stretch of the imagination. Under the alias William Bowery, Alwyn is credited as a co-writer on songs by the bands Folklore and Evermore. William Bowery is also credited as a co-writer on the song “Sweet Nothing” by the Midnights. Vulture pointed out that the YouTube video description uses the U.K. copyright single and that the song seems to be sung by someone with an English accent. It’s interesting to note that the cover art for the song features a baby with blonde hair, which could be a picture of Alwyn when he was younger.
Niceboy Ed released his second single, titled “Heaven,” on October 14th of this year. Just like “Life You Lead,” the cover art has a photo of a blonde baby. Naturally, Swifties flooded his Instagram comments asking if either Alwyn or Swift was behind the music, as they did with his first post announcing “Life You Lead.”
Swift herself is no stranger to sneakily promoting music that she secretly has a connection to. In 2020, she promoted a cover of her song “Look What You Made Me Do” by a мysterious band named Jack Leopards & The Dolphin Club, which detectives deemed to actually be her brother Austin, given that The Dolphin Club was an old Twitter username of his and the cover art for the song purportedly included a childhood photo of him.
Following Taylor Swift’s use of a song by Niceboy Ed in one of her music videos, the Instagram account associated with the artist added a simple smiling emoji to the post that it shared to its story after it was brought to his attention. If you ask me, this is a very intriguing topic! Swift may simply be helping one of Alwyn’s friends promote their music, despite what Swift’s fans may be interpreting from it, and they may be reading too much into it.
Come clean, Niceboy Ed (if that’s your real name), if that’s your real name!