It’s official. Taylor Swift officially has a new album coming out.
Titled The Life of a Showgirl, it’s her 12th full length original work. As if the Swifties weren’t excited enough, the news was also announced on the latest episode of her boyfriend, Travis Kelce’s podcast New Heights. Cue internet meltdown.
But the pair didn’t just talk about TS12. Over the course of a marathon two-hour session, they discussed everything from the start of their relationship to the Easter eggs that Swift has made a habit of leaving in her work, pointing towards the next release.
If you don’t have time to listen, then good news: we’ve rounded up the highlights here.
The start of their relationship
Turns out, the way they started dating was pretty sweet and old fashioned. Cast your mind back a few years, and Kelce actually announced to the world that he wanted to date Taylor Swift – via this very same podcast, in fact.
“It was such a wild, romantic gesture to just be like, ‘I want to date you’,” she told the podcast.
“It felt more like I was in an Eighties 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’,” she said. “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.”
“I knew that he wasn't crazy the first couple of times that we talked,” she continued. “I was just like, he's truly getting to know me in a way that's very natural, very pure, very normal. Just the way that he could make me laugh so immediately about normal things. Travis is a vibe booster in everyone's life that he's in. He's like a human exclamation point.”
The pair did also touch on how they handle attention from the outside world.
“I don’t see a lot of things,” Swift added. “I’ve been in the music industry for 20 years. It’s pretty hard to hurt my feelings at this point.”
Kelce, meanwhile, says he’s learned from his girlfriend “how to be a pro about it”.
They bonded over being ‘athletes’
Turns out being a pop star is actually really hard on the body. Who knew? Swift’s pre-show prep infamously involves her running full-speed on a treadmill, singing her songs at full volume – unsurprisingly, she said the Eras Tour involved “a lot of physical therapy” and “a lot of being in a state of perpetual discomfort.”
The pair apparently did bond over this. “When I saw the recovery station in the hotel room after [the Eras shows], 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.’” He later added that “we related on how much torture we put our bodies through.”
Taylor sent her mother to buy back her master recordings
If you’re even a bit of a Swiftie, you’ll know about the album debacle. Swift signed with her first label, Big Machine, when she was 15, and revealed that she had been saving up to buy her back catalogue pretty much ever since.
However, it was not to be: in 2019, Scott Borchetta, head of Big Machine, sold the rights for her first six albums to Scooter Braun, and he then sold them to private equity firm Shamrock Capital for around $300m.
Despite then going on a vengeful album re-recording spree, Swift eventually bought back all the rights to her albums in May.
On the podcast, she got emotional talking about it.
“[The songs are] my handwritten diary entries from my whole life; these are the songs I wrote about every phase of my life,” she said. “Rather than send lawyers or management in a big crew, I sent my mom and my brother. 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.”
When the news came through that Shamrock had agreed to sell, she “just, like, very dramatically hit the floor… I started bawling my eyes out.”
When she went to tell Kelce: “He thought something was wrong; I started absolutely heaving. I had no power in my legs to support myself.”
Taylor loves Easter eggs
Not the chocolate kind, obviously. The kind that her fans love as well, which see her spreading lots of subtle hints and clues about her upcoming work in her tour, album artwork, music videos and more.
One of the more popular theories going around currently involves the colour palett, which featured in her last-ever Eras Tour show and was sprinkled around some of her social media content afterwards. It’s since been confirmed that orange is the official ‘colour’ for the album.
Swift is aware of the hype. “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?” she said. “I’m never gonna plant an Easter egg that ties back to my personal life. It’s always gonna be towards music.”
She also said that her favourite Easter egg-y speech she’s given was her 2022 commencement speech at NYU, where she put “so many lyrical Easter eggs in that speech” pointing towards her then-upcoming album Midnights.
“I love numerology, I love math stuff, I love dates, that stuff I just find really fun,” she said.
The pair are in a sourdough phase
Sounds like their home life is wholesome. According to Swift, “My hobbies could be categorised as hobbies you could have had in the 1700s.” That includes sewing, painting, cooking, as well as a baking obsession.
Currently, that has taken the form of sourdough: the pair are “very deep in a sourdough obsession that has taken over my life. I’m really talking about bread 60 per cent of the time. It’s become a huge, huge factor,” she said. “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,” Kelce said, to which Swift replied, “Oh, I’m on your blog. Girl, I’m on your blog.”
There will only be 12 tracks in The Life of a Showgirl
We did find out a little more about the album, too. The songs were inspired by 12 experiences Swift had during her huge Eras Tour, and the closing track will be a collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter.
“This album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and and vibrant,” she said. “It just comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life. That effervescence has come through on this record.”
It’s also, very definitively, going to be 12 tracks long. “It's not like The Tortured Poets Department where I was like, ‘Here's a data dump of everything I thought or felt in two or three years. Here’s 31 songs.’ This is 12,” she said. “There's not a 13th, there's not a 14th, there's not other ones coming.”
The tracklist, which was revealed too, looks like this
- The Fate of Ophelia
- Elizabeth Taylor
- Opalite
- Father Figure
- Eldest Daughter
- Ruin the Friendship
- Actually Romantic
- Wi$h Li$t
- Wood
- Cancelled!
- Honey
- The Life of a Showgirl (featuring Sabrina Carpenter)
