Swift chatted about her new album, her relationship timeline, NFL fans, and more on New Heights.
There was once a time when musicians turned to an in-depth magazine profile or late night TV spot to announce an upcoming project. Now, podcasts have become the defacto launch pad for these moments. It’s easy to understand when you look at the numbers, Taylor Swift’s appearance on New Heights, the video podcast co-hosted by her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, was viewed more than nine million views in its first 12 hours on YouTube this week. A livestream of the pre-recorded interview was briefly hit by technical issues after more than a million people tried tuning in.
New Heights, in which Kelce discusses football and pop culture with his brother, Jason, doesn’t normally pull such figures, but then Swift is not normally a guest on the show. She made her first pod appearance since confirming her relationship in October 2023. In a lengthy (over two hours) conversation, Swift confirmed details of her new album and discussed the timeline of her and Kelce’s dating, buying back the masters of her back catalog, and her newfound baking hobby. Read on for a full run-down of the episode.
First of all, she knows NFL fans are sick of her
New Heights is normally a podcast for football fans wanting to hear from two of the sport’s biggest names. Swift might not have much to say about the Philadelphia Eagles chances of regaining the Super Bowl and she got out in front of that fact off the top.
“As we all know, you guys have a lot of male sports fans that listen to your podcast,” she said. “I think we all know that if there’s one thing that male sports fans want to see in their spaces and on their screens — it’s more of me.”
Swift’s joke was a reference to fan complaints that her presence at Kelce’s games had become a distraction, prompting the NFL to step in and defend their coverage.
Brad Pitt paved the way for Swift to be on a podcast
In a landscape dominated by comedians, wellness gurus, and reality TV contestants, true A-listers haven’t fully embraced the podcast circuit, For Swift, however, that chaned when Brad Pitt appeared on Armchair Expert while promoting his recent movie, F1. “I just said, ‘Can I go on the podcast? Brad Pitt did it, and I want to do it too.’ Swift said when explaining why she wanted to go on New Heights.” Some fans have called out this remark as insensitive, given the allegations of abuse leveled at Pitt by Angelina Jolie in 2022.
Her new music is “exuberant, electric, and vibrant”
The chief motivator for Swift’s New Heights appearance was to announce her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl.
“This album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this [Eras] tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant,” Swift said on the podcast. “It just comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life. And so that effervescence has come through on this record.”
Asked by Jason Kelce to tell him about her goals for the album, she said she wanted “melodies that were so infectious that you’re almost angry at it, and lyrics that are just as vivid but crisp and focused and completely intentional.”
A Max Martin reunion was needed to help with that
Swift worked with producers and songwriters Max Martin and Shellback on her new album, reuniting with the duo she previously worked with on her pop-leaning albums Red, 1989, and Reputation.
“When I was on tour in Stockholm, I had Max Martin come out to the show,” Swift told the Kelces, “and I was talking to him, and I was just like, ‘I feel like we could knock it out of the park if we went back in.’”
“The three of us have made some of my favorite songs that I’ve ever done before,” she said. “We’ve never actually made an album before where it’s just the three of us. There are no other collaborators, it’s just the three of us making a focused album where it felt like catching lightning in a bottle.”
That “no other collaborators” line, of course, means The Last Showgirl will be a Jack Antonoff (and Aaron Dessner)-free zone.
The album was made during the Eras tour
Soon after meeting with Martin, it sounds like the album started to become a reality. “I would be playing shows. I would do like three shows in a row. I’d have three days off. I’d fly to Sweden, go back to the tour, and was actually working on this. I was physically exhausted at this point in the tour, but I was so mentally stimulated and so excited to be creating,” Swift explained.
There won’t be a deluxe edition
In recent years Swift has released a lot of music. The Last Showgirl will be different, though. “With Tortured Poets Department, I was like, ‘Here’s a data dump of everything I thought and felt in two or three years. Here’s 31 songs.’ This is 12. There’s not a 13th, there’s no other ones coming. This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time…Every single song is on this album for hundreds of reasons, you know, and you couldn’t take one out, and it’d be the same album. You couldn’t add one. It’s just right.”
“That focus and that kind of discipline with creating an album and keeping the bar really high is something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time,” she added. “I tend to write lots and lots of music, so it’s a temptation to release lots of music. But oftentimes, I wanted to do an album that was so focused on quality and on the theme and everything fitting together like a perfect puzzle that these 12 songs for my 12th album, I feel like we achieved that and I’m really happy about that.”
Swift hasn’t completely moved away from giving fans something to gorge on. There are four limited-edition deluxe variations of The Life Of A Showgirl, all of which contain special artwork, booklets, photocards and more, available to pre-order on her website.
Even she thinks her Easter eggs are a bit “Zodiac killer”
Swift also spoke about all the ways she toys with her fans by burying Easter eggs, or hidden teasers, in her performances and public appearances. For example, her final performance on the Eras tour ended with Swift exiting through an orange tunnel, a color that features heavily in the artwork for the new record.
The secret messages are “something that you don’t know I’m saying for a specific reason, but you’ll go back and be like, ‘Oh my God!'”
“It’s always going to go back to my music,” she added, joking that fans have become so adept at working out the clues it has got a bit “zodiac killer”.
Podcast boyfriend, pop star girlfriend
In a piece of meta-commentary most podcasters are guilty of, Travis and Taylor spent time discussing New Heights itself.
“This podcast got me a boyfriend,” she said, referencing the way he used the pod as a “personal dating app” by making his interest known to listeners.
She said the clip, which went viral, felt like the John Hughes movie Say Anything where “he was standing outside of my apartment, holding a boom box saying, ‘I want to go on a date with you'”.
Describing her boyfriend as “a vibe booster in everyone’s life” and “a human exclamation point,” Swift added that she thinks meeting him was the moment she had “been writing songs about, wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager”.
She cried after buying back her masters (Taylor’s version)
In May this year, it was announced that Swift was finally the sole owner of the rights to her first six albums, bringing a close to a long battle over the ownership of her music.
She opened up to the Kelce brothers about what that moment meant to her. “I want this because it was my handwritten diary entries from my entire life,” she explained, saying it was not a financially-motivated move and that she could only afford it off the back of the hugely successful Eras tour.
She said she sent her mother and brother to negotiate with Shamrock Capital, the Los Angeles-based investment firm that previously owned her masters, to underline the emotional importance of the deal. Swift said that when her mom callled to say they had agreed to the sale, “I just very dramatically hit the floor. For real. Bawling my eyes out, and just weeping. This changed my life.”
Her hobbies are all things “you could have had in the 1700s”
Between buying back her masters, wrapping up a world tour, and making a new album, Swift has been busy. That’s not to say she hasn’t made time for some new ways to relax. Per Swift, she likes sewing, painting, cooking and has “a different baking obsession every six months.”
In a very pandemic-coded move, she admitted to being “very deep in a sourdough obsession that has taken over my life. I’m really talking about bread 60% of the time. It’s become a huge, huge factor … I’m on sourdough blogs! There’s a whole community of us!”