Two Showgirls In Love: Travis Kelce And Taylor Swift Have A Chat
A few minutes into her Aug. 13 appearance on New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift said, “This is my first podcast.” I thought she was making a little joke—surely she’d talked to Marc Maron, Bowen Yang, or those two exasperated, newly popular ladies who look like Karens, but actually want all Karens brutally annihilated. But there was no laughter. Not from her, Travis (her boyfriend of two-ish years), or Jason (her boyfriend of two-ish years’ older brother). This was in fact her first appearance on a podcast. And over its 104-minute runtime, I was begrudgingly in its grim, peculiar thrall, watching both a version of Swift I was prepared to see—the ruthless, narrative-driven capitalist—and one that repeatedly surprised me: a funny, frequently dull late-thirties girlie who would come this close to relatability if not for her billion-dollar net worth.
Ever the fan of announcing an announcement, Swift told the world she would be revealing the title and cover of her forthcoming album on Wednesday, which explains why somewhere between 1.1 to 1.5 million hyped-up viewers were watching the New Heights stream alongside me. I’ve never listened to the podcast before this episode, for two simple reasons that I hope won’t offend any of Defector’s blessed readership: 1) I know enough about CTE to believe football shouldn’t exist, and 2) It’s hard for me to listen to straight men talk to each other about anything other than movies. If I’m to endure a story that begins with “A buddy of mine,” that kindling that ignites 80 percent of straight-guy tangents, both the speaker and his buddy had better know Lydia Tár’s birth name. But this episode wasn’t about sports, at least not in the way I assume most of the others are. Taylor is introduced within the first four minutes, and stays on mic and on camera for the duration. She’s dressed in business casual while visiting her boyfriend’s office, wearing a loose-fitting white button-down shirt, khaki bottoms of an indeterminate style and shape, subtle orange tint on her lips, almost certainly a nod to the glittery album she’s about to unveil.
Swift and Kelce’s relationship is old news. They’ve been dating since 2023, when Kelce publicly swooned over her on an episode of New Heights, which she later heard and deemed “metal as hell.” But it was somewhat surprising to see a discernible shape and tenor of their relationship reveal itself in this episode. For years, their dynamic could only be speculated upon based on paparazzi footage of the two of them entering/exiting a restaurant or kissing in a stadium after one of them clocked out of work, but here they suddenly were, speaking like two (I use this word deliberately) lovers who are completely, hopelessly, and utterly obsessed with each other. It is high school from its tone and aesthetics, he the jock and she the cheerleader, down to its content. “[Travis] may not have read Hamlet,” Taylor tells Jason in a tangent reminiscent of something overheard outside an 11th-grade English classroom before a test. “But I explained it to him.” How peculiar to see one of the most famous celebrity couples in the country give their first joint public interview not to Oprah or any other esteemed journalist, but to a retired football player.
Taylor’s presence turns Travis into a co-interviewee; they appear as a single unit, squeezed shoulder to shoulder in front of Travis’s shelf of knick-knacks, football ephemera, and art books on Basquiat, Ai Weiwei, and—I had to zoom in for this one—”CATS.” We’re used to seeing Swift tease her albums/eras via meticulous Instagram rebrands (1989 & Reputation), award-show speeches of varying awkwardness levels (Midnights, a 3, and The Tortured Poets Society, a 9.5), and even Knowlesian surprise drops (Folklore and Evermore, both announced mere hours before their release). But while her love life is inextricable from her diaristic music, we’ve never seen her wrap an album’s rollout so tightly around a romantic partner. Before revealing the vinyl album art for her 12th studio album, we’re asked to witness and affirm their affection for one other. They clutch each other’s forearms, they finish each other’s sentences, they laugh while telling anecdotes that clearly meant to show they, too, have inside jokes and memories. Appearing on her boyfriend’s already successful podcast the same week he’s promoting a GQ cover story about his upcoming football season isn’t just media savvy; it’s an act of love. How often do we see her literally share the wealth?
As they cling to each other like a pair of skydivers with a single parachute, Jason asks questions from the opposite side of the frame, seated in what looks like a “man cave”—those mystifying spaces known for their abundance of beer despite seeming, to me, like the most depressing places on earth to drink it. (He and Travis signed a $100 million deal for their podcast last year, so why does he keep his Peloton between two fridges and a recliner?) From this man cave, he smiles as his baby brother speaks in near-constant hyperbole. Travis calls himself “the luckiest man in the world.” He says Taylor is both “the greatest songwriter of all time” and “the smartest woman in the world.” On his hoodie is the world “MIRACLE,” and I wondered if it was missing an arrow pointing to his left.
But Travis’s ebullience is precisely what I expected. What shocked me was the extent of Taylor’s reciprocity. “He’s like a human exclamation point,” she says of him, making no sense whatsoever, before breathlessly recounting how she went from not knowing a single thing about football to becoming its biggest fan over the span of their short relationship. And you know what? I believed her. I believed her when she talked about how thrilling it is to watch games with the Kelces. I believed her when she said she ran through her house screaming, “We drafted Xavier Worthy!”—possibly because I don’t know who Xavier Worthy is! I believed every single thing she said about that man. I believe Taylor Swift has never been happier.
Equally surprising were the moments when Swift—an artist known for an obsessive, almost maniacal control of her image and messaging—allowed herself to sort of drone on about whatever. I’m used to reading highly edited, possibly Tree “Trina” Paine-approved, profiles of Taylor Swift in Vanity Fair and Vogue, or hearing her wax poetic about music to radio hosts like Zane Lowe. I was entirely unprepared for a painfully dull anecdote about her dad’s unparalleled social skills making his recent stay in the hospital kind of funny for her, her mother, and brother—all of whom privately fought over who would be tasked with taking his phone away so he could get some rest. (He’s fine now, by the way, but I’m still recovering from the anecdote.)
As fans, we tend to crave what we haven’t got: personal details from the most private celebrities, and a break from the most public ones. As someone who is both inescapable and tight-lipped, Swift straddles the line between those two categories. Appearing on a longform video podcast with two close allies both satiated a collective thirst for candidness while simultaneously taking her to even newer heights of overexposure.
Later, she and Travis launched into an extended, unironic conversation about their shared love for numerology: a pseudoscience about the supernatural power of numbers that is so inane and childish that it makes astrology feel like quantum physics. Beyoncé’s control over her personal image—her unwillingness to be interviewed beyond a tightly controlled, probably scripted Q&A or “as told to” magazine piece—is well-documented and oft-discussed, and there were moments during this interview where I could practically hear her thinking, “This is precisely why I don’t do any of that.”
The beauty of music, even music as autobiographical as Swift’s, is its ability to be both projection and projector. The listener’s stories can matter as much as the artist’s. But when the musician’s story devolves into an aimless tangent about why she’s a “13” and he’s an “87” or whatever the fuck, delivered to their affable almost brother-in-law? Not so much. It was discombobulating to watch Swift in this mode: still charming and in control but comfy-cozy nearly to the point of being unrecognizable.
I’m not delusional enough to characterize Swift’s appearance on New Heights as “relatable,” exactly, but for me it cracked the spell she’s had on the culture for the past half-decade. For years, I’ve watched her push the ceiling of pop superstardom higher and higher, smashing and then rebuilding the studs with every new record, however ridiculous the milestone. (“First Woman With New Number One Albums In Five Consecutive Years” is very OK diva, sure, I guess that’s a thing that can be done.) It’s not that the pop star suddenly has no clothes, but maybe, for the first time in a while, we’re realizing she also occasionally does laundry.
I should say now that when it comes to Taylor, I’m neither Swiftie nor Snake; I like about as much as I don’t. My favorite album of hers is Folklore, the sad and introspective folk-ish work she dropped in the summer of 2020, but I can also probably recite the entirety of Reputation and 1989. The singular reason I’m not net-positive on her is on full, grating display throughout roughly 40 percent of this episode. Have you ever watched someone cry while telling a story about spending nearly half a billion dollars? I don’t recommend it. The saga of Swift’s long battle to reclaim ownership of all her music is a story much too long to be recapped here, but the story ends with her spending somewhere around $400 million to buy them back. The value of ownership isn’t lost on me—having control over one’s creative output is something to fight for—but watching a billionaire shed happy tears over being able to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on songs that will make her hundreds of millions more, while two millionaires look on, holding in tears of their own, is frankly impossible for me to think of as anything but than nauseating.
Travis is quick to compliment her artistry, but he never mentions what I find to be her most well-honed and impressive talent: a generational mastery of capitalism. No other artist in the history of music has squeezed out more money, more reliably and more repeatedly from their fan base. While I do genuinely admire her music, and believe that all artists should be paid fairly, I find it hard to reconcile that with her insatiable hunger for new revenue streams. No one is forcing anyone to spend money on Taylor Swift, but the glee with which she encourages her fans to part with more and more of their money often makes me wonder what exactly we’re all celebrating here—or if there’s anything left to celebrate at all.
When we reach the final segment of the episode—the moment millions of adoring fans had been waiting for since she announced the announcement—what had been a genuinely revealing and compelling (if occasionally dull) conversation suddenly dropped the veil it had held for the previous 90 minutes. Taylor Swift is releasing a brand-new album called The Life of a Showgirl on Oct. 3. Max Martin produced it. You know who he is because you know all the lyrics to “…Baby One More Time,” even if you won’t admit it. The standard cover art features her in a beaded, sparkling Las Vegas showgirl costume, half-submerged in murky green water. It’s expectedly hideous and, like her other albums, might have no correlation with the sound or quality of the music. The album title is scrawled in a glittery orange font, but if you don’t care for orange, there are multiple of limited-edition vinyl variants—green, red, and beige—available on her website right now. Oh wait, those are already sold out. They probably were before I even started writing this.
