If I were writing a song about Travis Kelce, a man I’ve never met, I would mention that he plays football, and that he has a podcast. I’d point out that he’s about to marry Taylor Swift, and that the two of them appear to be very happy together. I might also include a line about how Kelce seems fun; he has good vibes. If I were really reaching—and I almost certainly would be, because, again, I don’t know him—I’d resort to basic physical descriptions. He’s tall, and has noticeably large hands (great for catching balls). Also, he’s pretty hot.
These aspects, and seemingly these alone, are the ones that Swift dwells on in “The Life of a Showgirl,” her twelfth studio album, which came out on Friday. “Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes,” she sings in “The Fate of Ophelia,” which also includes a passing reference to Kelce using his “megaphone”—a.k.a. his podcast, “New Heights”—to publicly express his interest in her, after he had attended one of her Eras Tour shows in 2023. In “Wi$h Li$t,” Swift says she “made wishes on all of the stars” for someone like Kelce: “Please, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot.” The next song, “Wood”—Sabrina Carpenter-esque in content and Jackson 5-like in sound—is essentially one long dick joke. (Well, not that long: at two minutes and thirty seconds, “Wood” is technically the shortest track on the album.) “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was the key that opened my thighs,” she sings. At one point, she suggests that Kelce has reached “New Heights of manhood.” (“Singing about travis kelce’s penis over a Jackson 5 sample should get you taken out back like a rabid dog,” one person wrote on X.)
When Swift first announced that she had made a new album—in a guest appearance on Kelce’s podcast, which he co-hosts with his brother, back in August—she said that the music came from the “most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic” period of her life. Career-wise, she was at a peak: she’d begun writing the record while she was still on the Eras Tour. But she was also alluding to her relationship with Kelce. Swift described his public attempts to court her, adding “This is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teen-ager.” After they finished recording the podcast, Kelce proposed to Swift in his back yard.
I must admit that, when I heard about the engagement, I immediately wondered what it would mean for her music. I fully accept that this is a prime example of how we think of artists less as real people than as entertainment. And that’s the sort of thing that I expected Swift to spend more time grappling with on “Showgirl,” which she billed as a behind-the-scenes look at the pressures of being a performer. Swift is the most commercially successful musician alive, and it might seem, at best, reductive, and, at worst, misogynistic, to suggest that her love life would have any bearing on the quality of her work. She had spent the early years of her career contending with a “boy-crazy” image, largely driven by the media and her detractors, which she would go on to satirize in “Blank Space,” her song about her “long list of ex-lovers.” And yet these men haven’t just been her boyfriends; they’ve been her muses. She is a master of telling personal stories, making them sound compelling and, most impressively, making them feel relatable. This is often achieved through the heavy use of metaphor: a person who is beautiful inside and out is “a mansion with a view” (“Delicate”); a decaying long-distance relationship is captured through “the rust that grew between telephones” (“Maroon”). Some have speculated that “Wood” is a riff on a viral 2021 tweet lampooning Swift’s songwriting style, in which a user joked that Swifties must be horrified when Ariana Grande “sings about sex and doesn’t write it like ‘he stuck his long wood into my redwood forest and let his sap ferment my roots.’ ”
She has always had an instinct for narrative, so it’s striking that, as Swift’s relationship with Kelce has grown more serious, the story she’s told about him has largely remained the same. On “So High School,” one of her first songs about him, she sings, “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle.” A little more than a year later, when she posted about their engagement on Instagram, she captioned the post “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” These are the roles they adopted, too, when Swift went on Kelce’s podcast. At one point, Swift described some of her music as “esoteric.” “She’s so hot when she says these big words,” Kelce said. Swift gave him a slightly exasperated look: “You know what esoteric means!”
Prior to Kelce, Swift’s muse was Joe Alwyn, a British actor who’s seemingly so kind and unassuming in real life that he keeps getting typecast in films as a sexual predator. (“Boy Erased,” “Kinds of Kindness,” and, depending on your interpretation of a scene that happens offscreen, “The Brutalist.”) Alwyn is the presumptive inspiration for “Delicate,” “Gorgeous,” and the other love songs on “reputation”—which, despite being framed as a revenge album, is probably Swift’s most romantic record—as well as many tracks on her subsequent album, “Lover.” (“I’ve loved you three summers now, honey, but I want ’em all,” she sings, on the title track.) Alwyn and Swift were still dating when she made “folklore” and “evermore,” the indie, lyrical masterpieces that she released during the pandemic, and he even helped write a few of the songs. (“I just heard Joe singing the entire fully formed chorus of ‘betty’ from another room,” Swift explained in her documentary-style concert film, “folklore: the long pond studio sessions.”) Alwyn is also credited as a songwriter on “Sweet Nothing,” one of the loveliest songs in Swift’s discography, about a partner who wants nothing but your company—in a world that demands everything else—on the “Midnights” album.
Swift and Alwyn broke up in 2023, and, roughly a year later, she put out “The Tortured Poets Department,” an album that covered three muses: Alwyn, the 1975’s front man Matty Healy, and Kelce. Healy and Swift’s relationship may have been controversial and short-lived, but I will always be grateful for it, because it resulted in “Guilty as Sin?,” which might be the only truly erotic song that Swift has ever written. (The track, which is about the thrill of fantasizing about someone who you’re no longer with, suggests that Swift is better at writing about the fantasy of sex than about the actual act of it.) Kelce, meanwhile, got the aforementioned “So High School” (“Brand new, full throttle / Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto”) and “The Alchemy” (“So when I touch down / Call the amateurs and cut ’em from the team / Ditch the clowns, get the crown / Baby, I’m the one to beat”).
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