Given that it was conducted by her boyfriend and his brother, Taylor Swift’s interview with NFL players Travis and Jason Kelce on their New Heights podcast was never going to be the toughest of her career, but it still managed to deliver some big revelations.
Swift’s appearance marked the start of her doubtless all-encompassing marketing campaign for her upcoming 12th album The Life of a Showgirl. Teased earlier this week, we now know that this will be released on 3 October.
We also know that, as rumoured, the album - the whole album, in fact - has been produced by Swift alongside Max Martin and Shellback.
“It's a record I made with my mentor, Max Martin, and Shellback,” says Swift. The three of us have made some of my favourite songs that I’ve ever done before.
Asked by Jason Kelce to name some of these, Swift replies: “They were my main collaborators on the Red album. We did We Are Never Getting Back Together, I Knew You Were Trouble, 22, Shake It Off, Blank Space, Style, Wildest Dreams…”
Some of Swift’s most popular - and poppy - songs, in other words, and when Jason Kelce suggests that The Life of a Showgirl will contain “some fucking bangers,” Swift nods in agreement.
Explaining why she decided to have Martin and Shellback onboard for the entire project, Swift says: “We've never actually made an album before where they're where it's just the three of us. There's no other collaborators. It's just the three of us making a focused album where, I mean, it felt like, it felt like catching lightning in a bottle.”
Swift adds that she had worked with the Swedish duo for around seven or eight years and reveals that her initial approach to Martin - who, along with Shellback, she describes as a “genius” - came during her Eras tour, when she caught up with him in his homeland.
“I was on tour in Stockholm, I had Max Martin come out to the show, and I was talking to him, and I was like, ‘I just feel like, I feel like we could just knock it out of the park if we went back in and we did this all in Sweden, and it was just us three.’ I essentially said to him, ‘I want to be as proud of an album as I am of the Eras Tour and for the same reasons, you know?’ And and he was like, ‘do you understand what kind of pressure that is?’”
Swift suggests that she had full confidence in him, though, sensing that their time apart from each other when she was making more “esoteric” albums such as Folklore and Evermore could benefit them going forward.
“Those were a little bit more, like, alt-folk kind of leaning and just kind of exploring and trying to challenge myself as a writer,” Swift says of those two ‘lockdown’ albums, “and I feel like both Max and Shellback did that too in their own ways, going out into the world. And by the time we came back together, I feel like we had so much more dexterity to what we do, and it's almost like we'd all grown up so much.
"Shellback and I were both in our early 20s when we started working together, the three of us, and so it was very much like we were the ingénue and Max was the mentor. And this was the time where it felt like all three of us in the room were carrying the same weight as creators, and it was really special, and it meant the world to me to have this creative experience where we knew that we had to bring the best ideas we've ever had.”
Best ever? That’s a big claim given Swift, Martin and Shellback’s previous critical and commercial success, but Swift is bullish about it, saying that she’s well aware of the pressure she’s putting on the album, “but I don't care, because I love it that much, and I'm so proud of it.”
And this time, we’re told that, unlike with The Tortured Poets Department, her previous record, which revealed itself as a double album on the day of release, what you’re see in the just-released tracklisting is what you’re going to get.
“We were just like, there's no other songs coming,” confirms Swift. “It's not like with Tortured Poets Department [where] I was like, here's a data dump of everything I've thought in two or three years. Here's 31 songs. This is 12. There's not a 13th, there's not a 14th, there's not other ones coming. This is the record I've been wanting to make for a very long time.”
One other tidbit that’s emerged via the Daily Mail is that leaked liner notes indicate that track 4 on The Life Of A Showgirl, Father Figure, gives a writing credit to a certain George Michael, who recorded a song of his own by that name. Assuming that this isn’t a straight cover, this suggests that Swift has sampled or interpolated Michael’s Father Figure on hers, which could be interesting. Swift previously covered another Michael song, Last Christmas, way back in 2007.
Oh, and while Swift says that The Life of a Showgirl was made with just her, Max Martin and Shellback, that’s not quite true. The title track, which closes the album, features Sabrina Carpenter, teeing up the possibility of a pop collaboration for the ages.
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