#whereas NT’s just seem like they all came straight out of the Are The Straights Okay subreddit- but instead it’s Are The NT’s Okay

[baycitystygian]

I know I generally embrace being autistic but today the hardest parts of it were really in the foreground for the entire fucking exhausting day… having auditory issues on a VERY important phone call that I needed to make and fighting for my life to understand what the poor sweet insurance lady was saying because the audio was so distorted… having a way-too-long discussion with my sister where I (1) promised to “castrate [her baby daddy] like a hog” for ghosting her and genuinely meant it (thinking about stuffing his nards as a wall trophy tbh, if he doesn’t wanna be a dad so badly then surely it’s no loss to him!) and (2) argued with her about laws that are stupid and shouldn’t apply to her situation (that’s a long story)… which probably did not make her feel any bit better and honestly I think both of us are much more stressed out afterwards. like some situations get me so outrageously mad that I literally cannot handle it and I need to remove myself from the conversation because the other person isn’t budging because it’s something they have zero influence over and they are just trying to explain the damn thing but it’s Wrong in my eyes so I feel the need to argue my case and how the fuck does anyone put up with me

like I know I don’t go into much detail about personal issues on here (or much of anything re: IRL me) but uh. that’s a huge thing I struggle with and I have no clue how to change it. It’s like, does no one else have common sense? Why can’t anyone else see this? and it feels like screaming into the void and it makes me feel terrible and it only stresses out the other person who is Not Getting Paid Enough (well, at ALL) to deal with Whatever This Is

[yaz-the-spaz]

WHY ARE PEOPLE SAYING ZAYN DIDN'T WRITE IDWLF?? I SAW AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES FOLEY ( Fifty Shades Darker director ) AND HE SAID ZAYN HAD WRITTEN THE SONG. WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

Hey anon!

So before your question I had always thought it was just Taylor Swift, Jack Antanoff and Sam Dew who had written the song seeing as that’s the narrative that we were fed/that was largely pushed and they’re listed on Wikipedia as the only song-writers, and also I could be misremembering but I could’ve sworn I remembered there being an interview where Zayn was asked about it and he specifically mentioned Taylor as the main writer but didn’t say anything about himself having a hand in it. However, upon receiving your question I went searching the interwebs to double check and found myself in the same head-scratching predicament as you because while Wikipedia lists only the three of them (Jack, Sam, and Taylor) as the writers, Genius lists all four of them (Zayn included) as writers…

[Putting the rest under the cut because this got way long, so sorry anon!]

Wikipedia:

Genius:

Genius also conveniently lists these tweets from Antonoff re the song:

But then there’s also this tidbit listed further down the page which completely contradicts the whole play-by-play Antonoff gave of the making of the song:

Now I know Genius isn’t always the most reliable source but they’re generally fairly reliable when it comes to the actual song credits and stuff I’m pretty sure (I think they even make it a point to reach out to artists and confirm lyrics and song info and stuff like that too?). But even if by chance they did have the wrong info as far as the official song writer credits, the tidbit above matches/goes along with what Zayn said on the Elvis Duran show:

“We were kind of in separate places when I mentioned the idea to her [Taylor]. I spoke to her on the phone, and she heard the song because Jack had played it to her. She really liked it, and she went in the studio the next day. I think she was somewhere else…so she already reached out because Jack had just played her the song anyway because we’d done it together. She mentioned to me that she liked the song, so I already kind of knew in the back of my head that she liked it so I asked her if she wanted to be on it and she was cool with it.”

Now you can take Zayn’s statements howrever you will (especially seeing as how it was filled with official narrative bs about G*gi, which I skipped over for all of our convenience and sanity’s sake) but it seems to me that he’s hinting he and Jack initially worked on it/started writing it together – note how he says we’d done it together right after mentioning Jack’s name which makes it seem like the ‘we’ is referring to himself and Jack (alternatively it could be in reference to himself and Taylor but that just doesn’t really seem to make sense in the context of the sentence imo), and I can only assume the ‘it’ is in reference to the song because idk what else ‘it’ could have been referring to in that instance. He also makes it seem like he (and not Jack like the tweets seem to suggest) was the catalyst for getting this whole collab together seeing as he implies that he was working on it with Jack first (or at least heard it first) and then thought of Taylor and decided to bring her in on it, which seems pretty backwards considering she’s supposed to be one of the writers and we’re supposed to believe Zayn isn’t. 

But if that really were the case wouldn’t it make more sense that she was the one that heard it first/was working on it with Antonoff first and then she contacted Zayn, seeing as she’s one of the ones that helped write it? Are we supposed to believe that Zayn heard the song/possibly even started working on it with Jack and then decided out of the blue to call up Taylor (who just so happens to be Besties™ with his “gf” and also live in the same city as Jack) and ask her to be one of the writers on the song without contributing anything to the song himself (either before or during the time Taylor was supposedly working on it with Jack)? As far as the whole calling Taylor part idk, could be official narrative, could be true, but the details (and the connections b/t not only G*gi and Taylor but also Jack and Taylor) sound a bit too set up and a bit too screwy and inconsistent to me. And another thing, and this is a small thing, but Antonoff also said he recorded Taylor at his house but as you can see above Zayn seems to think otherwise – “I think she was somewhere else” lol. 

Now all of that seems to completely contradict what Antonoff said on Twitter, no?

As I said before his tweets seem to imply, imo, that he was the one (not Zayn) that got this all together. He doesn’t mention anything about Zayn being the one to call Taylor up, or about him hearing it first, which I could kind of excuse given the relatively truncated way of explaining things Twitter forces people into with their character limit, but he doesn’t even mention anything about working with Zayn on the song before Taylor came on the scene, which seems like kind of a major thing to skip over if you ask me because it means Zayn might have played a larger role in the making of the song than Jack seems to imply and which Jack possibly just skipped over, whereas what he wrote actually seems to minimize Zayn’s role. In fact, he really only mentions Zayn peripherally when he mentions him sending in his vocals in. 

So who’s lying? 

(Or at least omitting important info?) 

Tbh it could be either of them, I mean we know Zayn’s no stranger to lying (lol I never talked to Harry even when I was in the band, there’s no interband relationships, my girlfriend G*gi, I talked to Liam two weeks ago, you guys are gonna start seeing a bit more of me…I can’t even type any of that with a straight face lmao). But considering that Zayn said what he said in passing and in a very vague way I’m inclined to believe that at least that part of what he said probably aligns more closely to the truth (it’s possible he wasn’t meant to say it/include it and it was a slip up on his part and/or intentional shade which only makes me believe even more that it might be true) and that Jack possibly purposefully omitted/was told to omit that bit of detail from his tweets to downplay Zayn’s role in the song.

And taking all of that into context with James Foley implying/saying that Zayn wrote the song (I haven’t seen the interview you referenced so I can’t be sure if he actually said it point-blank or just implied it and that was how it came off), these seemingly conflicting narratives imo all point to something seriously fucky with the origins of this song…

It’s possible Zayn could have contributed to it and just not have been listed (like Liam with Get Low) though, unlike Liam and Zedd obviously, neither Zayn nor Taylor have ever directly cited him as having contributed lyrically, again possibly minimizing his role (though I’d take Zayn’s statements above as kind of an indirect citing and/or possible shade, if you will). Considering the fuckiness with his team and his on-going connections to Sony/Syco, if he did contribute somehow unofficially it could be that he’s not allowed to really talk about it, i.e. not allowed the same freedoms as Liam as far as disclosing whether or not he contributed at all, or it could be that it’s more of an open secret and he just was told to emphasize Taylor only (since part of idwlf promo and the interviews that followed its release were used as positive promo for Taylor to get people back on her side in a climate that’s growing increasingly done with her bs).Or it could be that none of that’s the case and I’m just reading too much into all of this and talking out of my ass. 

Basically to answer to your question idk what the truth is lol he could have had a hand in it and just didn’t mention it/was told not to mention it/didn’t get credited officially, or it could be that he wasn’t involved at all outside of his vocal feature and James Foley is just confused and/or assumed that because he was featured on the song he also had a hand in writing it when he didn’t. (And/or that I’m just reading too much into things). As for my personal beliefs though I’m honestly more inclined to believe Zayn himself (and people on the periphery, like James, not connected to OT/NT) over whatever screwy narrative Taylor/Antonoff/Taylor’s Team/Sony/Syco/Zayn’s Team seem to have tried to push re this song but at the end of the day it’s up to you as to what you choose to believe.