Taylor Swift Credits Jay Z for Bringing Her and Kanye West Together

Taylor Swift and Kanye West are all smiles when pictured together these days, but how did they put aside the past and become friends? In the September issue of Vanity Fair, the “Bad Blood” singer reveals how mutual friend Jay Z unknowingly helped her reconcile with Kanye years after he crashed her 2009 VMA acceptance speech.

“I feel like I wasn’t ready to be friends with [West] until I felt like he had some sort of respect for me, and he wasn’t ready to be friends with me until he had some sort of respect for me—so it was the same issue, and we both reached the same place at the same time,” she tells the magazine.

It was Jay Z who brought them together. “I became friends with Jay Z, and I think it was important, for Jay Z, for Kanye and I to get along. … And then Kanye and I both reached a place where he would say really nice things about my music and what I’ve accomplished, and I could ask him how his kid’s doing.”

As for a collaboration, nothing is currently in the works, but the door is open. “We haven’t planned anything,” said Swift. “But, hey, I like him as a person. And that’s a really good, nice first step, a nice place for us to be.”

Earlier this year, Kanye spoke about a potential collaboration with Swift. “She wants to get in the studio and we’re definitely going to go in,” he told Ryan Seacrest. “Any artist with an amazing point of view, perspective, fan base, I’m down to get in the studio and work. I don’t discriminate, I don’t have an elitism of music because of like how many Grammys or you know, the amount of ratings you get on an album.”