Taylor Swift is getting emotional remembering the time she found out she owned the rights to all of her music once and for all.
The 14-time Grammy winner first revealed in a letter shared to her official website in May that she’d successfully bought back the full rights and masters to her first six albums, therefore making her the owner of her entire discography. The news came after years of drama surrounding the ownership of Swift’s music catalog, which culminated in her decision to just re-record the albums she didn’t own.
On the New Heights podcast — which is hosted by her boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother Jason —on Wednesday, Swift started crying while giving an inside look at how her big purchase came to be. For starters, she explained owning the rights to her music has always been a major goal for her. “It’s a huge thing,” she said on the podcast. “It’s always been a huge thing for me. Like, since I was a teenager, I’ve been actively saving up money to buy my music back to ever own it in the first place, because it’s usually the label that owns it. But I’ve always wanted this to happen.”
“My music has been sold a few times. The first time that it was sold, it really ripped my heart out of my chest,” she said, referring to the original purchase of her masters by former music manager Scooter Braun in 2019. “And I told everybody exactly how that felt for me and what I was going through, and I started basically defiantly re-recording my music because I wanted to own it, and this was the only way I thought it was ever gonna happen.”
Over a year and a half after buying them, Braun sold Swift’s masters to private equity company Shamrock Capital. Fast forward to post-Eras Tour, and Swift said she and her team decided to approach the company, but she knew she didn’t “wanna be in a partnership. I don’t wanna own 30% of it. I want to own all of it.”
So, rather than send a “big crew” to meet with the company, Swift said she sent her mother and her brother to Los Angeles for the meeting. Recalling this, Swift started tearing up, which she apologized for. “Sorry,” she said, her voice breaking. “They sat down and they — like this happens, I don’t ever really talk about it because it’s — shoot,” she added, pausing again with emotion. “They sat down with Shamrock Capital, and they told them what this meant for me.”
She continued, “They told them the whole story of all the times we’ve tried to buy it, all the times it’s fallen through, all the times we had gotten plans together and figured out something we thought was gonna work, and it didn’t at the last minute.”
Swift recalled that her mother called her afterwards to report that Shamrock had heard them out and were “wonderful,” but not to get her hopes up. Months later, after this year’s Super Bowl, Swift was in Kansas City with Travis when her mom called her again.
ANDRE DIAS NOBRE/AFP/Getty
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With tears in her eyes and her voice breaking again, Swift recalled, “I get a call from my mom, and she’s like… she’s like, ‘They, they, we, we… you got your music.’ And, so sorry, this is— it’s literally been so long since this happened, every time I talk about it [I get like this] — she was like, ‘You got your music.’ And I just, like, very dramatically hit the floor for real. Like, honestly, just started bawling my eyes out, and I’m just, like, just weeping and kind of, like, unable [to talk]. I was just like, ‘Really? Are really? Really? What do you mean? What do you mean?'”
The Life of a Showgirl singer then told the comical story about how she immediately went to go tell Travis, who was playing video games, the news, and she couldn’t do it without “absolutely heaving” with sobs, so naturally he thought something was wrong at first.
But, all was well, in the end. Concluded Swift, “Yeah, this changed my life. I can’t believe it still. Every time I think about it, it’s like, I have to tell the short version to everyone because it is still like, this will affect the rest of my life. I think about this every day now, but instead of it being like an intrusive thought that hurts me, it’s, I can’t believe this happened. Like, how lucky am I? How grateful am I?”
Elsewhere on the podcast, above, Swift details what she’s been up to after the record-breaking The Eras Tour, her experience as a member of the Chiefs kingdom, and all the details on her new album, The Life of a Showgirl.
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