Success is guaranteed for Swift's new album - and it is no accident

Taylor Swift's podcast interview this week with her American footballer boyfriend, Travis Kelce, yielded plenty of titbits for fans.

- By Laura Snapes

Taylor Swift's podcast interview this week with her American footballer boyfriend, Travis Kelce, yielded plenty of titbits for fans. Across two hours of loose chat on the New Heights show he helms with his brother, Jason (a retired footballer), Swift revealed that she lurks on baking blogs. The couple spent the summer caring for her 73-year-old father, Scott, after his quintuple heart bypass. She taught Kelce the plot of Hamlet and how to not internalise speculation surrounding 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 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 blockbuster shifts from country to mainstream pop to indie. Nor her staggeringly successful campaign to rerecord her first six albums to devalue their master recordings, which were sold by her first record label to an industry enemy, and then to a private equity company. "But the Eras tour," she said, "was so much better than anything else."

Eras leapfrogged becoming the first ever billion-dollar tour to become the first ever two-billion-dollar tour. That would be plenty of cause for celebration and a good long rest. So would, as Swift announced in May, finally owning the rights to those first six albums. But Swift evidently isn't ready to let that feeling of having "made it" go. She appeared on New Heights to announce her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, arriving just 18 months after its predecessor and 10 months after the tour concluded.