We’re going to have to accept the reality that that Kanye West/Taylor Swift collaboration will probably never happen. But West and Swift seem to be on good terms these days, a far cry from the time, a few years ago, when they were media-ordained enemies. And in a new Vanity Fair cover story, Swift explains how their friendship came to be. She says it had something to do with her becoming friends with Jay Z (and of course she’s friends with Jay Z), but it had more to do with West learning to respect her. Here’s what she says:

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. 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.

In that same piece, Swift talks a bit about her open letter to Apple and the way se sees the Apple Music/Spotify dynamic: “Apple treated me like I was a voice of a creative community that they actually cared about. And I found it really ironic that the multi-billion-dollar company reacted to criticism with humility, and the start-up with no cash flow reacted to criticism like a corporate machine.” Read more from the piece here.