Taylor Swift was a dream houseguest while she recorded her hit 2020 album Evermore at Marcus Mumford’s home studio.
Speaking on the Wednesday, November 12, episode of the “Table Manners With Jessie and Lennie Ware” podcast, the Mumford & Sons frontman recalled how Swift’s producer, Aaron Dessner, reached out to him to ask if the pop superstar could use his personal studio, which is situated on the farm Mumford and wife Carey Mulligan own in Devon, England.
“Aaron called me and said, ‘I’ve got someone I’m working with that needs a studio in the U.K.’ And I was like, ‘Cool. Well, if it’s one of your homies, then I’m sure it’ll be fine. Like, what is it? Beyoncé or something?’” Mumford, 38, recalled. “He was looking for a discreet studio in London. I was like, ‘I don’t think there really are any.’ And he was like, ‘Can they come and use yours?’”
“And it was Taylor Swift. She came down right at the end of COVID, and was the most phenomenal houseguest,” Mumford praised the “Fate of Ophelia” singer. “Burned a lot of vegetables for her. And she brought a killer candle. Her candle game was excellent. And she finished the second half of Evermore in our studio, which was really sweet.”
“And then she asked me to sing on one [of the songs] and I said yes,” he added, referring to performing backing vocals on the Evermore track “Cowboy Like Me.”
While Swift, 35, was an ideal houseguest, the singer’s pal Zoë Kravitz recently revealed how she and mom Lisa Bonet “completely destroyed” Swift’s bathroom when they took shelter at her Los Angeles home amid the California wildfires in January.
The drama occurred when Bonet’s pet snake, Orpheus, went missing in Swift’s house.
“I was packing up my things and I was saying to my mom, ‘I wanna be a good houseguest. I like to leave places better than I found them. I don’t want her to even know we were here,’” Kravitz, 36, recalled on Late Night With Seth Meyers in August.
“So, I was kind of going around and cleaning up, and I’m downstairs, and she’s upstairs, and my phone rings. It’s my mom. I’m like, ‘That’s weird because we’re in the same house,’” Kravitz continued. “I answer the phone and she goes, ‘Hi,’ and I’m like, ‘Your voice is super high.’ And she’s like, ‘I’m in a little bit of a pickle. Can you come upstairs?’ I go upstairs and the bathroom door is closed, so I open the bathroom door, and she’s, like, crouched in the corner in this weird way.”
“I’m like, ‘What’s going on, dude?’” Kravitz explained. “And she’s like, ‘So … I was washing my face and I had Orpheus, and I just put her down for a second, closed the door, and she found this little hole in the corner.’”
“My mom’s holding the snake’s tail. They’re all muscle, they’re very, very strong. I don’t know what to do. I’m like, ‘OK, maybe this hole goes into the drawers.’ So I get down on the ground, I take the drawers out. No,” she said. “Start to panic. As it’s happening, the snake is getting further and further [into the hole]. I was panicking so much that my mom likes to say, ‘If I had both hands, I would have slapped you.’ I was freaking out. I’m like, ‘Mom, I can’t bring you anywhere!’”
Swift’s house manager eventually helped out, Kravitz revealed.
“He gets a crowbar and starts having to tear apart this banquette. We’re ripping up the tile. We’re scratching the walls,” the actress said. “Completely destroyed Taylor’s bathroom and there was this moment where I was like, ‘Either we destroy her bathroom or I have to tell her that there’s a snake somewhere in her house.’”
