We kind of cannot believe we are writing this, but yes, Taylor Swift did a podcast.
On Wednesday, Swift went on the podcast co-hosted by Travis Kelce, her boyfriend and a three-time Super Bowl champion, to announce that her newest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” will be released on Oct. 3. She also emotionally discussed reclaiming her master recordings and revisited her blockbuster Eras Tour.
The 124-minute episode on “New Heights” enabled Swift’s legion of fans to hear straight from the pop star at considerable length. While rising to the pinnacle of popular culture, she has opted to communicate directly with her fans through posts on social media rather than sit for traditional interviews. (In 2023, Swift did speak with Time magazine when it named her person of the year.)
Of course, being interviewed on a podcast hosted by her boyfriend and his brother, the retired N.F.L. center Jason Kelce, provided a special sort of home-field advantage.
Here are four takeaways from their conversation:
‘The Life of a Showgirl’ will include upbeat anthems.
“The Life of a Showgirl,” Swift’s 12th studio album, is produced by Swift, Max Martin and Shellback, who worked with her on “Red” and “1989,” albums that are considered some of her biggest hits. Sabrina Carpenter is featured on the new album’s title track.
Swift received some unusually blunt criticism after releasing “The Tortured Poets Department” last year. Critics like Lindsay Zoladz of The New York Times, and even some fans, suggested that the 31-song album could have used editing.
On the podcast, Swift said that her new album would include only 12 songs and that she had kept the bar really high.
“I tend to love to write lots and lots of music,” Swift said. “So it’s a temptation to release lots of music. I wanted to do an album that was so focused on quality and on the theme and everything fitting together like a perfect puzzle.”
She also affirmed an observation by Travis Kelce that “Showgirl” would be a “180” from many of the songs on “The Tortured Poets Department.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Life is more upbeat.”
She specifically said the songs would include vivid and crisp lyrics, as well as “melodies that were so infectious that you’re almost angry at it.” Kelce, who has listened to the album, said: “You are going to move. This album is going to make you dance.”
‘Behind the scenes’ on the Eras Tour is the new album’s theme.
Swift said she made “The Life of a Showgirl” during the Eras Tour, thus its name.
Why an orange palette for the album cover? “It feels like kind of energetically how my life has felt,” she said. “And this album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour.”
The 21-month tour, which celebrated the many phases of Swift’s career and ended in December, generated $2 billion in ticket sales over nearly 150 shows across five continents. Swift said she wanted to infuse elements from across entertainment genres, such as musical theater, opera and ballet.
“I wanted it to be references that I thought were really high concept and really high value for fans and for them to see things they hadn’t necessarily seen before all in one concert,” Swift said. “But I wanted to do it at the highest intensity, rapid fire, ‘You’re seeing something new every 15 to 30 seconds,’ and so it feels like you’re scrolling in an algorithm.”
Swift and Kelce joked that the physical demands of the tour in some ways mimicked his football routine with the Kansas City Chiefs. Kelce noted that her recovery after a show had included using toe spacers because she had been performing while wearing high heels.
Swift said she had cried after learning she could buy her masters back.
For years, Swift has been rerecording her earliest albums and releasing them as “Taylor’s Version” because she did not own their master recordings, which limited her ability to control the music rights.
But in May, Swift announced she had bought back the masters of her first six albums from the investment firm Shamrock Capital, giving her ownership of that music as well as all of her music videos, concert films, album art and photography and unreleased songs. It was a momentous deal that ended a saga that began in 2019 when the music manager Scooter Braun acquired the catalog; he sold it to Shamrock the following year.
On the podcast episode, Swift said that months after her mother and brother had met with Shamrock Capital to discuss buying her masters, her mother called to say the company had agreed to sell her the music back. Swift began crying at that point, she said, leaning on Kelce while he was playing video games.
“Just dead weight,” Kelce said.
“I had no power in my legs to control myself,” Swift said.
Swift said maintaining control of her intellectual property was important.
“If I never would have been able to buy back my music,” Swift said, “one day, someone else would be leaving all of my music from my first six albums to their kids in their will.”
That moment on the football field was a cherished memory.
Swift’s appearance on “New Heights” was something of a full-circle moment.
It was on a 2023 episode that Kelce told his listeners that he had been thwarted in an attempt to slip Swift his number at one of her concerts. But Swift and Kelce would soon begin dating, which the world learned when she began making public appearances at his Kansas City Chiefs football games. Swift attended their overtime Super Bowl victory in 2024 and their Super Bowl loss this year, while Kelce made a brief appearance as a backup dancer in one of her concerts.
On Wednesday, Kelce and Swift recalled some of the high points of their relationship. Swift said she had to be convinced by Kelce’s mother to go down onto the field after the Chiefs advanced to the Super Bowl in 2024.
“I’m walking out onto this field and it’s just like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God — there’s so many lights,” she said. “I’ve never seen this many cameras. I’ve never seen this much media in my life and I’ve seen a lot of media.”
She added, “I’m experiencing this whole heightened scenario that I had no idea five minutes before I was going to be experiencing, and it’s one of my most cherished memories.”
While Swift thanked the podcast for initially connecting them, Kelce said he was appreciative of the tour and the chance to see Swift in different settings.
“To see you on the stage and you see how crazy you can get an entire stadium going, and then I get you in a room and it’s, like, I’ve known you forever,” he said.
The Eras Tour, the couple noted, had allowed them to travel the world together.
“When we first started dating, he was like, ‘I always wanted to go and really vacation in Europe and see Australia and go to Asia,’” Swift said of Kelce. “And I was like, ‘Well, I got a tour for that.’”
