Charlie said that he met a friend for lunch who had heard an early leak of the album and told him that Taylor had mentioned him. Charlie said: “My brain immediately went to ‘Oh, like in an interview or something. That’s cool. I love Taylor Swift.’”
When he realized it was in a song, the star prepared to find out that it was fake. Charlie remembered thinking: “I’m going to wake up tomorrow and it was just a big joke that someone was playing on me because someone thinks I shouldn’t be a bigger artist, so get the biggest artist since the Beatles to say that I should be a bigger artist. Ha ha ha.”
But when the album was released, Charlie heard the song for the first time while brushing his teeth. He told Rolling Stone: “My first thought was, like: ‘Wow. She said my name.’ She kind of said it like P-O-O-T-H. And I just cried, dude.”
