How Travis and Taylor got together
Two years ago, American footballer Travis Kelce famously used the New Heights podcast – which he hosts with his brother Jason – to announce that he wanted to date Taylor Swift. This was after he failed to get her attention at her Eras tour show at Arrowhead Stadium, home to his team, the Kansas City Chiefs. Somehow, it worked: he managed to get the girl.
Swift has now shed some light on how she felt about this approach.
“It was such a wild, romantic gesture to just be like, ‘I want to date you’,” she said, looking at Kelce. But he “never did any proper logistical planning” to meet her at Arrowhead Stadium, she joked. He didn’t even contact her management. “[He thought] because he knows the elevator lady, that he could talk to her about just getting down to my dressing room. That’s how it works in 1973!”
As someone who is “genuinely terrified to open my DMs”, she said Kelce’s blunt announcement intrigued her.
“This felt more like I was in an 80s John Hughes movie and he was just standing outside of my window with a boombox being like, ‘I want to date you! Do you want to go on a date with me? I made you a friendship bracelet’ … I was like, if this guy isn’t crazy – which is a big if – this is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.”
She described Travis as “a vibe booster in everyone’s life that he’s in. He’s like a human exclamation point.”
How they handle attention about their relationship
Jason Kelce asked how his brother and Swift deal with the intense public speculation about their relationship, including the numerous theories going around online. (“I’m way too invested,” Jason said.)
“I don’t see a lot of things,” Swift said. “I’ve been in the music industry for 20 years. It’s pretty hard to hurt my feelings at this point.”
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Travis Kelce said he’d learned from his girlfriend “how to be a pro about it.”
“There’s still some wacko theories from the beginning that I was like, ‘Oh no, how is she handling this,’” he said. “The last thing I wanted to do was screw this up.”
Finding humour in it helped, Swift added: “It’s at a point where … my name can be in the actual headline and it can still be none of my business.”
The similarities between being a pro footballer and a pop star
Part of Swift’s preparation for her three-hour shows on the Eras tour was repeatedly running full speed on a treadmill while singing the entire show. She said Eras required “a lot of physical therapy” and “a lot of being in a state of perpetual discomfort”, including aching feet and plenty of blisters.
She saw similarities in Travis’ career: “I’m not getting hit by huge 300-pounders, but the heels …”
“When I saw the recovery station in the hotel room after [the Eras show], with the toe-spacers … I’m telling you, dude, the similarities were crazy,” Kelce said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. She does more than I do.’ … We related on how much torture we put our bodies through.”
Taylor sent her mother to buy back her master recordings
Swift signed with her first label, Big Machine, at the age of 15, giving them the rights to her master recordings. In 2019, label head Scott Borchetta sold those six albums to music executive Scooter Braun, who then sold them to the private equity firm Shamrock Capital for a reported $300m.
To regain control over her catalogue after the sale to Braun – and to devalue his investment – Swift embarked on a project to rerecord her first six albums, rebranding each one as “(Taylor’s Version)” and adding new tracks.
And in May, the singer bought back the master recordings to her first six albums, giving her control over her entire catalogue for the first time.
On the podcast, Swift revealed she had been saving to buy back her catalogue since she was a teenager – and “it really ripped my heart out of my chest” each time it was sold.
When the Eras tour ended, she sent her mother and brother to negotiate on her behalf with Shamrock Capital, not lawyers, because she wanted to convey the emotion involved.
“‘[These are] my handwritten diary entries from my whole life; these are the songs I wrote about every phase of my life’ … Rather than send lawyers or management in a big crew, I sent my mom and my brother,” Swift said, crying. “They told them what this meant for me, they told them the whole story of all the times we’ve tried to buy it, all the times it’s fallen through.”
She cried again as she recalled her mother telling her Shamrock had agreed to sell: “I just like very dramatically hit the floor … I started bawling my eyes out.”
She ran to Travis crying to tell him the news, while he was playing video games. “He thought something was wrong, I started absolutely heaving. I had no power in my legs to support myself.”
She said an unexpected bonus of the “Taylor’s Version” rerecords was raising awareness among musicians about what they might be signing away. “I have so many new artists come up to me now and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t even know this was a thing’.”
Taylor Swift really loves coming up with the Easter eggs
Perhaps the biggest thing that separates Swifties from the rest of the population is their appetite for Swift’s Easter eggs – hints she drops about her future music or deep-cut callbacks to past songs. (Sorry Swifties, everyone else is either bewildered or mildly exasperated by this.) For The Life of a Showgirl, for example, she left the stage at her final performance on the Eras tour by walking down an orange tunnel – the colour theme for her 12th album – and has peppered in references to both orange and the number 12 on her social media.
“People are like, ‘The Easter eggs thing is getting a little Zodiac killer at this point.’ I’m like, as long as they like it, ya know?” Swift said. But: “I’m never gonna plant an Easter egg that ties back to my personal life. It’s always gonna be towards music.”
She said her favourite was the 2022 commencement speech she gave at NYU, while receiving an honorary doctorate. Swift says she planted “so many lyrical Easter eggs in that speech” that hinted to Midnights, released later that year.
“I love numerology, I love math stuff, I love dates, that stuff I just find really fun,” she said.
She might be on your baking blog
Swift revealed that “my hobbies could be categorised as hobbies you could have had in the 1700s” She likes sewing, painting, cooking and has “a different baking obsession every six months.”
“I’m the luckiest man in the world,” Travis said.
The couple are currently both “very deep in a sourdough obsession that has taken over my life,” Swift said, adding: “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!”
“There are a lot of people hoping that you’re on their blog,” Travis joked, to which Swift replied, “Oh, I’m on your blog. Girl, I’m on your blog.”
Travis Kelce really likes otters
The internet agreed Kelce was officially a good guy when a dig through his old Tweets turned up this charming nugget from 2011: “I just gave a squirle [sic] a peice [sic] of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy.”
In between sourdough blogs, Travis shows her videos of wild otters, Swift said.
“I want a wild otter so bad,” Travis said. “I just want to find these little creatures and be their friend.”
Swift said “He wants one specifically whose life he saved and who knows he saved its life … He doesn’t want to go up to an otter and take it from its mother. He wants to see an otter who is like, ‘My paw’s caught in a shell. And he’s like, ‘I got you’. And then the otter’s like, ‘Thank you forever’, with its little paws.”
“And then I bring him anchovies every couple months,” Travis said.
Oh, and Swift has a new album coming
The Life of a Showgirl is out 3 October, with Swift revealing it is inspired by everything that happened behind the scenes while she was on the Eras tour.
Travis shared his review: “It’s so much fun … I know there are only 12 bangers. It is a lot more upbeat and a lot more fun pop excitement. I think its a complete 180 from a lot of the songs on Tortured Poets, for sure.”
“Life is more upbeat,” Swift said, laughing.
