Relationship and new album – what we learned from Taylor Swift on Travis Kelce’s podcast

Taylor Swift has revealed details of her new album and given a rare insight into her relationship with boyfriend Travis Kelce during a highly anticipated appearance on his podcast.

The pop superstar used the interview on New Heights, co-hosted with Travis’s brother Jason Kelce, to announce that her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, will be released on 3 October.

She also discussed how she and Travis got together and their life together, as well as subjects ranging from reclaiming the rights to her first albums, the hidden clues she plants in music for fans, and her record-breaking Eras Tour, to her love of baking sourdough bread.

It marked a change for the megastar, who tends not to give interviews, instead sharing updates on her life through song lyrics, which are dissected by obsessed fans.

More than 1.3 million people tuned in live for the broadcast.

Here is some of what we learned from her appearance.

As well as the release date, Swift revealed the cover of The Life of a Showgirl, which features the singer wearing a jewelled dress lying in water, with only her face and wrist above the surface.

The cover represents her private moments after coming off stage on tour, she explained. “This represents the end of my night… My show days are the same every single day, I just have a different city. And my day ends with me in a bathtub – not usually in a bedazzled dress.”

And the album itself is about “the life beyond the show”, she said.

“I would say it’s everything that was going on behind the curtain.”

Swift explained that she wrote the album while on her Eras Tour and would frequently return to Sweden to work with collaborators Max Martin and Shellback while performing in Europe, in order to record it.

“I was basically exhausted at this point in the tour, but I was so mentally stimulated and so excited to be creating,” she said.

Travis added: “Literally living the life of a showgirl.”

The record was simultaneously made available for pre-order on her website, which started crashing as soon as the podcast began.

Swift went on to read out all 12 track names, including the title track featuring Sabrina Carpenter.

1. The Fate of Ophelia
2. Elizabeth Taylor
3. Opalite
4. Father Figure
5. Eldest Daughter
6. Ruin the Friendship
7. Actually Romantic
8. Wi$h Li$t
9. Wood
10. CANCELLED!
11. Honey
12. The Life of a Showgirl (feat Sabrina Carpenter)

“I know someone who’s freaking out and it’s me,” Carpenter wrote on Instagram.

Travis said the album is “upbeat” and will make people dance. He called it a 180-degree turnabout from her last album, The Tortured Poets Department.

“Life is more upbeat,” Swift said in response, smiling and looking at Travis.

She continued: “I’m so proud of it, and it just comes from, like, the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life, and so that effervescence has come through on this record.”

She said: “I wanted the album to feel the way my life felt, and this completely matches the way that my life has felt.”

It is “the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time”, she added.

She also held up the sparkly orange vinyl, and said that colour was chosen because she likes and felt energised by it.

Swift also spoke about all the ways she uses Easter eggs – or secret messages to fans – to tease her music.

She said she has rules for these covert clues in her music and performances.

“I’m never going to plant an Easter egg that ties back to my personal life. It’s always going to go back to my music,” she said, joking that some fans are so good at decoding her that it’s almost gotten a bit “zodiac killer”.

The secret messages are “something that you don’t know I’m saying for a specific reason, but you’ll go back and be like, ‘Oh my God!'”

She said her favourite example was a speech she gave when she received an honorary doctorate.

“I put so many lyrical Easter eggs in that speech that when the Midnights album came out, after that, the fans were like, ‘The whole speech was an Easter egg!'”

She also spoke about her love of numbers and dates.

“I love math stuff,” she said, saying 13 was her favourite number.

Travis, she said, is “87” – the number he wears on his game jersey – and she noted that 13 plus 87 equals 100.

Some of her hidden messages are so complex, she said, they are crafted “upside down, backwards in Braille”.

Near the beginning of the show, Swift was asked why she chose to appear on the podcast, which caters primarily to sports fans.

“This podcast got me a boyfriend,” she said, accusing Travis of using the broadcast as his “personal dating app” to connect with her.

Before they even met, Travis famously gushed on the podcast about attending one of Swift’s concerts and being disappointed when they couldn’t meet.

He talked about making her a beaded friendship bracelet, which were popular during the Eras Tour, and said he wanted to give her his phone number.

She said the clip, which went viral, felt almost like “he was standing outside of my apartment, holding a boom box saying, ‘I want to go on a date with you'”.

Family and friends then started persuading her to take him up on his offer.

“My relatives, my cousins, were like, ‘Please, please, please, he’s amazing’. There were friends that were like, ‘He’s actually an amazing guy, he’s so great’. There was a lot of people whispering in my ear about you.”

She said it was exactly the moment she had “been writing songs about, wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager”.

“It was wild, but it worked… He’s the good kind of crazy,” she said, calling her boyfriend “a human exclamation point”.

She and Travis spoke fondly about their love, describing how they bake sourdough bread together.

His dough winds up with chest hair in it, while hers has extra cat hair, she joked.

“I had never experienced something so mesmerising on stage, and then so real and beautiful in person,” said Travis.

Jason then joked that maybe he should leave, and give them some privacy, as Swift swooned.

“Yeah I think so, honestly,” Swift responded. “At this point, I think everyone should leave.”

While Swift has at times been shy about discussing her relationship in public, Travis has been more outspoken. Before the podcast aired, he told GQ in an interview: “I love being the happiest guy in the world.”

As well as baking, Swift revealed the other “granny” hobbies she has got back into now her tour is over.

“I’d say all my hobbies could be categorised as hobbies you could have had in the 1700s,” she said.

“I like to sew,” she said, telling Jason she specialises “as you know in children’s purses and baby blankets” – obviously a reference to gifts she’s made for his young children.

“I love to paint, I love to cook, I have a different baking obsession every six months. Right now, we’re very deep in a sourdough obsession that’s taken over my life.”

Swift said she knew nothing about football before their romance began.

“I didn’t know what a first down was,” or a “tight-end” (the position Travis plays), she said.

Swift said she appreciated Travis’ patience when they started dating and introducing her to his world.

She’s now personally invested, citing a moment where she found herself interested in a recent player trade.

Travis told her he will be “forever grateful” that she embraced his world “wholeheartedly”.

In May this year, it was announced that she had bought the rights to her first six albums, ending a long-running battle over the ownership of her music.

After her original masters sold, she vowed to re-record all six albums, which became known as “Taylor’s Versions”.

Swift grew emotional as she explained the process by which she purchased her master recordings, after trying for a decade to secure the rights.

She said she was not interested in the financial rewards the albums would bring.

“I want this because it was my handwritten diary entries from my entire life,” she said.

She said her mother and brother had talked to Shamrock Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, about purchasing her music.

When her mother called her, saying “You got your music,” she said: “I just very dramatically hit the floor. For real.

“Bawling my eyes out, and just weeping. This changed my life.”

She also thanked loyal fans for listening to her re-recorded albums, saying they reacted to the dispute over rights to her music with the Western cowboy expression “we ride at dawn”.

Swift also said it was through her fans that she was able to buy back her music.

“The reason I was able to purchase my music back is they came to the Eras Tour,” she said.

Swift was also asked which versions of her albums her fans should listen to – now that she owns both versions.

“I think a lot of the vocals I did on the re-records were better than the original,” she said, adding she is especially fond of the remake of her 2012 album Red.

BBC News used AI to help write the summary at the top of this article. It was edited by BBC journalists. Find out more.