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, she joked. He didn’t even contact her management.
Photo: AP
“[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.”
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 humor 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.”
SIMILARITIES BETWEEN FOOTBALL AND POP STARDOM
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.”
MASTER RECORDINGS
Swift signed with her first label, Big Machine, at 15, giving them the rights to her master recordings. In 2019, label head Scott Borchetta sold her first six albums to music executive and Swift foe Scooter Braun, who then sold them to the private equity firm Shamrock Capital for a reported US$300 million.
To regain control over her catalog after the sale to Braun — and to devalue his investment — Swift embarked on a project to rerecord the albums, rebranding each one as “(Taylor’s Version)” and adding new tracks.
And in May, the singer bought back the master recordings to all six albums, giving her control over her entire catalog for the first time.
On the podcast, Swift revealed she had been saving to buy back her catalog 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.”
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