We use the term “relationship” loosely, of course. The story goes like this: Boy (Young) falls for girl (Swift) from afar, girl happens to be the world’s biggest superstar, and humbly responds to his gentlemanly gestures with a song for him on her record. You know, no big deal. Young admits that even he was shocked by the ‘Love Story’ singer’s ode to him. “I bought her record at midnight when it came out and I was playing through it top to bottom. I love the classic adding up the letters in her lyrics. I got to that song and it added up to my name and I had to take a step back and decipher the code,” he says. “We emailed back and forth for a while and she made some comment that I used the word ‘enchanted’ and the word ‘wonderstruck’ in an email and she said how she had never heard anyone really use that word before, so when that word was in the song, I was like this song has to be about me.”

Like the world’s biggest Taylor Swift fan, when Young met the 21-year-old music superstar backstage at one of his shows in New York, he was starstruck. “She was on her way up to meet me and that was the most nerve-racking few minutes of my life just waiting to meet Taylor Swift,” he says. “When I met her she was glowing and I was too. It’s hard to put into words, but I was definitely wonderstruck to meet her.”

Unfortunately for Young, nothing ever progressed beyond emails and one fateful meeting. “I think I’m not the most romantic and eloquent guy in the world,” he admits. “She’s just this endearing, wonderful girl and maybe I said something wrong. Who knows. It went on for three or four months, something like that.”

Young says he wanted, hopelessly, to get Swift’s collaboration on his new record, but she was simply too busy. As for their love affair that never was, he says he’s still single and not closing any doors just yet. “She’s a great person, and I am so inspired by her music and the person herself, she is who her music makes her out to be. She’s a superstar and I’m just this kid from a small town in the middle of nowhere, so I feel like that peasant in the midst of a princess and that whole classic story,” he says. “But who knows? There’s no telling.”