‘Life is more upbeat’: Taylor Swift talks new album in rare podcast appearance with Travis Kelce
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
The Life Of A Showgirl is American pop star Taylor Swift's 12th studio album.
PHOTO: TAYLOR SWIFT/INSTAGRAM
Emmanuel Morgan and Matt Stevens
Follow topic:
LOS ANGELES – Taylor Swift said on Aug 13 that her newest album, The Life Of A Showgirl,
The American pop star spoke about the album, reclaiming her master recordings
The Life Of A Showgirl is her 12th studio album and her first since The Tortured Poets Department, released in April 2024. The album’s producers are Max Martin, Shellback and Swift, and the title track features American singer Sabrina Carpenter.
On New Heights, Swift affirmed an observation by Kelce that the new album would be a “180” from many of the songs on The Tortured Poets Department. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Life is more upbeat.”
Swift received some unusually blunt criticism after her previous album, when critics like Ms Lindsay Zoladz of The New York Times, and even some fans, suggested that the 31-song album could have used editing.
Swift said the new album would include only 12 songs and that she kept the bar really high.
“I tend to love to write lots and lots of music,” Swift said. “So, it’s a temptation to release lots of music. I wanted to do an album that was so focused on quality and on the theme and everything fitting together like a perfect puzzle.”
She added that she made The Life Of A Showgirl during The Eras Tour, thus the name.
Why an orange palette for the album cover? “It feels like kind of energetically how my life has felt,” she said. “And this album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour.”
The 21-month tour, which celebrated the many phases of Swift’s career and ended in December 2024, generated US$2 billion (S$2.55 billion) in ticket sales over nearly 150 shows across five continents.
Swift began the podcast episode by talking about the saga of her master recordings. For years, she has been rerecording her earliest albums and releasing them as Taylor’s Version because she did not own the masters, limiting her ability to maximise income by licensing songs.
But in May, Swift announced that she had bought back the masters of her first six albums from the investment firm Shamrock Capital, giving her ownership of that music as well as all of her music videos, concert films, album art and photography and unreleased songs.
It was a momentous deal to end a conflict that began in 2019 when music manager Scooter Braun acquired the catalogue. He sold it to Shamrock the following year.
“If I never would have been able to buy back my music,” Swift said, “one day, someone else would be leaving all of my music from my first six albums to their kids in their will.”
As Swift has risen to the pinnacle of popular culture, she has opted to communicate directly with her fans through posts on social media rather than sit for traditional interviews. In 2023, she spoke with Time magazine when it named her Person of the Year. The 124-minute podcast episode enabled those fans to hear straight from Swift in what was something of a full-circle moment.
It was on a 2023 episode of New Heights that Kelce told his listeners that he had been thwarted in an attempt to slip Swift his number at one of her concerts.
Soon after, though, Swift and Kelce began dating, which the world learnt when she began making public appearances at the tight end’s football games. Swift attended the Kansas City Chiefs’ overtime Super Bowl victory in 2024 and their Super Bowl loss in 2025, while Kelce made a brief appearance as a backup dancer in one of Swift’s concerts.
Swift has rarely been on podcasts, although in 2020, she spoke about the songwriting process for her album Evermore on The Zane Lowe Interview Series.
New Heights, hosted by Kelce and his brother, retired football centre Jason Kelce, was the top-ranked podcast on Apple on Aug 13 morning as people scrambled to download it ahead of her appearance. NYTIMES
