Taylor Swift is Time’s Person of the Year … and rightfully so. (George Walker IV/AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Taylor Swift sat down for her first in-depth interview in years — and it did not disappoint.
The 33-year-old superstar was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the news in 2023. But what is surprising is how open the 12-time Grammy winner was during multiple sit-downs with the outlet, which perhaps is a nod to life with her new boyfriend, Travis Kelce.
“Over the years, I’ve learned I don’t have the time or bandwidth to get pressed about things that don’t matter. Yes, if I go out to dinner, there’s going to be a whole chaotic situation outside the restaurant. But I still want to go to dinner with my friends,” Swift shared. “Life is short. Have adventures. Me locking myself away in my house for a lot of years — I’ll never get that time back. I’m more trusting now than I was six years ago.”
Swifties will have a field day with that last line as it likely references the singer’s ex-boyfriend of six years, Joe Alwyn. She all but disappeared from public life during their relationship but roared back into the spotlight in March with her “Eras Tour” and all that followed. Swift’s high-profile romance with Kelce seems to fit in nicely with where she’s at in her life, and she doesn’t hold back in talking about her beau.
The “Mastermind” singer’s Time cover story was filled with many delightful, shady and thought-provoking quotes. Here are the five standout moments.
Swift lifts the lid on Kelce timeline — and says it would’ve been ‘psychotic’ to have their first date play out on national TV, as some suspected.
In July, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end said he “threw the ball in [Swift’s] court” after attending her concert. Kelce revealed that he failed to give her a friendship bracelet with his phone number and was bummed to learn she didn’t talk with people backstage.
“This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” Swift recalled. (For those wondering, “metal as hell” essentially means hard-core.) “We started hanging out right after that. So we actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other. By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple.”
The first game came in October when Swift was pictured in a box at Arrowhead Stadium to watch her boyfriend. She has been to five games in total, one in October becoming the most-watched Sunday game since the Super Bowl.
“I think some people think that they saw our first date at that game? We would never be psychotic enough to hard launch a first date,” she added. Swift also said there’s nothing to hide with this relationship. (Cough, sorry, Alwyn.)
“When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m going to see him do what he loves, we’re showing up for each other, other people are there, and we don’t care,” she declared. “The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone. And we’re just proud of each other.”
Swift also “playfully” quipped: “Football is awesome, it turns out. I’ve been missing out my whole life.”
Swift is OK upsetting ‘a few dads, Brads and Chads’
No one swooned over the singer and Kelce’s romance more than the NFL, something even Saturday Night Live poked fun at. But according to the “Lover” singer, she has no idea when or how much she’s being shown on TV.
“I don’t know how they know what suite I’m in,” she said. “There’s a camera, like, a half mile away, and you don’t know where it is, and you have no idea when then camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don’t know if I’m being shown 17 times or once.”
Swift said she’s sensitive to the attention she brings when she attends games. “I’m just there to support Travis,” she declared. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads and Chads.”
On being ‘canceled’ due to Kim Kardashian‘s ‘fully manufactured frame job.’
We all remember what spawned 2017’s Reputation. Swift publicly made up with Kanye West following the infamous 2009 VMAs incident but was burned again when Kardashian’s ex-husband name-dropped her in a song that included a vulgar line. West claimed Swift consented to the lyric — something she denied. Then Kardashian blasted an alleged phone call between the singers that appeared to show Swift giving her stamp of approval.
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” Swift recalled. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
Swift added of the 2016 scandal: “I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life.”
The singer was declared a “snake” on social media, an image she later harnessed for Reputation. Despite the fact the album was a smash success and that her lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” hit No. 1, she looks back at that era and said it was “a career death.”
“Make no mistake — my career was taken away from me,” she said.
Swift believes she was “canceled within an inch of my life and sanity.”
‘Trash takes itself out every single time’
While the events leading up to Reputation was a career-defining moment, according to Swift, so was Scooter Braun’s acquisition of her music catalog through 2017. She has rerecorded four of those six records, with Reputation (Taylor’s Version) seemingly around the corner.
“With the Scooter thing, my masters were being sold to someone who actively wanted them for nefarious reasons, in my opinion,” she said. (Braun has denied her narrative.) “I was so knocked on my ass by the sale of my music, and to whom it was sold,” she continued. “I was like, ‘Oh, they got me beat now. This is it. I don’t know what to do.'”
Swift sings “all I think about is karma,” and it would appear two of her biggest foes got theirs, as she suggested on “Look What You Made Me Do.” This year, it was revealed Braun lost his two biggest clients, Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, for reasons that are still a mystery. And West is still essentially canceled after last year’s antisemitism controversy.
“Nothing is permanent,” Swift said. “So I’m very careful to be grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level, because I’ve had it taken away from me before. There is one thing I’ve learned: My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art.”
Swift added: “But I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to, quote-unquote, defeat your enemies. … Trash takes itself out every single time.”
Swift hails Beyoncé as ‘warm and open and funny’
There is no competitive narrative between Swift and Beyoncé, both of whom embarked on record-setting tours over the past year.
“She’s the most precious gem of a person — warm and open and funny,” Swift gushed. “And she’s such a great disrupter of music-industry norms. She taught every artist how to flip the table and challenge archaic business practices.”
Beyoncé and Swift supported each other as they struck deals directly with AMC to release their concert documentaries. However, Swift called out people who tried to pit them against each other.
“There were so many stadium tours this summer, but the only ones that were compared were me and Beyoncé,” she noted. “Clearly it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other, even when those two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion.”
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