Swifties weren’t sure how to react to the news that Taylor Swift would be appearing on New Heights, the podcast hosted by her boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother Jason Kelce. The announcement arrived, in true Swift fashion, quite cryptically. After a full day of hints and easter eggs, a countdown appeared on Swift’s official website. Then, at 12:12 a.m., she unveiled the title of her upcoming album The Life of a Showgirl in a teaser trailer for the episode, which is out now.
“Taylor being on a podcast (nonetheless with her boyfriend) is such uncharted territory for us like how are we supposed to act normal about something we’ve never experienced before,” one fan shared on X. The statement assumes Swifties generally operate in a state of normalcy when there are details of a new album on the line. But the appearance does give them a lot to be excited about as Swift enters uncharted territory.
“I owe a lot to this podcast,” Swift said at the beginning of the episode. “This podcast got me a boyfriend ever since Travis decided to use it as his personal dating app about two years ago.”
Swift has been in the New Heights universe for a while, way before she made an official appearance. She and Kelce began dating in 2023, after the athlete declared his Swiftie status on an episode during the Eras Tour. “This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” Swift said later that year. “We started hanging out right after that.” By the time she attended her first Chiefs game, the two were already a couple.
In the episode, Swift and Travis went into detail about their epic love story. “It was such a wild, romantic gesture to just be like, ‘I want to date you,’” the singer said. “We live in a day and age where I’m not an online person at all… I’m genuinely terrified to open my DMs,” she added.
In contrast, Travis’ big gesture was a nostalgic move that caught the popstar by surprise. “This kind of felt more like I was in an Eighties John Hughes movie, and he was standing outside of my window with boom box, just being like, ‘I want to date you.’” As a prolific songwriter about love and heartbreak, the gesture meant even more to Swift. “This is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager,” she added.
The public attention around their relationship was a stark contrast from the six years that Swift spent with actor Joe Alwyn. “It can be perceived as something else because of how much it is talked about and how much we are tracked whenever we do go out,” Kelce said in a recent GQ interview. “It happened very organically, even though from a media standpoint it was being tracked. It still happened very organically.”
During the Eras Tour, Kelce made it to a few shows, and Swift returned the favor with cheers at his football games. He even joined her onstage for “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” in London. “You don’t realize how big that damn stage is,” he said on New Heights at the time. “It is easily as big as a football stadium. It’s way bigger than I could have ever imagined.” Maybe that will help their audience warm up to her a bit more.
“You guys have a lot of male sports fans that listen your podcast,” Swift said in a preview for the episode. “And I think we all know that if there’s one thing that male sports fans want to see in their spaces and on their screens, it’s more of me.”