Taylor Swift’s podcast interview with her American football player boyfriend, Travis Kelce, this week yielded plenty of tidbits for fans. Across two hours of loose chat on New Heights, the show Kelce helms with his brother Jason – also a football player – Swift revealed she was obsessed with sourdough and lurked on baking blogs. The couple spent the summer with her family, caring for her 73-year-old father, Scott, after he had a quintuple heart bypass. She gave Kelce a lesson on Hamlet and taught him how to avoid internalising speculation about their two-year relationship. You could call them the tentpoles of the 35-year-old pop star’s brand: literary passions and professional self-awareness.
One surprising revelation came near the end. Until the record-breaking 149-date Eras tour that Swift mounted from 2023-24, she said she had “never allowed myself to say: ‘You’ve arrived. You’ve made it.’” Being the only artist to win the Grammy for album of the year four times hadn’t done it; not the records broken, the acclaimed shifts from country to mainstream pop to indie. Nor her staggeringly successful campaign to re-record her first six albums to devalue their master recordings, sold by her first record label to an industry nemesis, and then on to a private equity company. “But the Eras tour,” she said, “I was like, this is nothing like what I’ve experienced before. It was so much better than anything else.”
