Taylor Swift played us again

Maybe it’s the dire state of the housing market lately, but I can’t seem to find a rock that’s suitable to live under. This stone is too porous, that boulder is too jagged; none of them has a square footage large enough to crush me so flat that an airtight seal will form between myself and the ground. Every rock I could conceivably live under has been compromised, and that’s just how Taylor Swift wants it.

Even if you’ve been living under a rock, it surely hasn’t been enough to shelter you from the news of Taylor Swift’s upcoming new album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” After all, you’re a human moving about the earth, and that means you’ve had this information disseminated through one of millions of T.S.-branded channels and firmly planted in your prefrontal cortex. It’s not just that there are headlines written every time Swift so much as breathes, it’s that there are headlines written that speculate when Swift will breathe and how long her breath will be. Will the breath be deep or shallow? Wheezy if, God forbid, the pop star has been stricken with a laryngeal malady? Or is she going to release a re-recording of her breath, along with a set of new, exclusive breaths from the vault? The constant theorizing about these breaths alone is enough to send the world into a frenzy. Naturally, when the breaths are strung together between lyrics and put to music in the form of an album, it’s a seismic event, one that no rock forged is strong enough to withstand.

But when Swift announced “The Life of a Showgirl” earlier this month, the news came in stark contrast to how the pop star revealed her last two original albums. While 2024’s “The Tortured Poets Department” and 2022’s “Midnights” were respectively announced during the Grammys and VMAs, the earth-shattering news about “The Life of a Showgirl” dropped on . . . a podcast. Swift didn’t just pop up on any old podcast, though; she appeared on her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s Wondery network show, “New Heights,” which Kelce hosts alongside his brother, Jason. Still, compared to the live-television spectacles that accompanied Swift’s last two album announcements, or the jaw-dropping surprise releases of “Folklore” and “Evermore” just five months apart, her latest move was decidedly low-key for the most famous woman in the world — or, at least it seemed that way. In mere hours and without any of the singer’s usual pomp and circumstance, Swift’s episode of “New Heights” smashed viewership records and became global headline news. After wrapping up her eye-poppingly successful Eras Tour and reaching the brink of celebrity overexposure in her public relationship with Kelce, Swift needed a way to forge forward with her latest record in a manner that wouldn’t deter sales or skew coverage. “New Heights” didn’t just give Swift the opportunity to humanize herself to those teetering on Taylor Swift fatigue; the show also allowed her to cleverly capitalize on a booming medium while remaining in control of how the latest chapter of her story will be shaped.

To understand the built-in hype that Swift leveraged by appearing on “New Heights,” one must remember that, in this period of late-stage Swiftian world domination, everything the pop star does should be considered a marketing move. Global supremacy doesn’t happen by chance, which means Swift can leave nothing up to the fates. Her art is her business, and Swift herself is a brand. More than any of her contemporaries, Swift has made herself synonymous with modern consumerism. A post teasing the new era on the fan club account managed by Swift’s team, Taylor Nation, was immediately inundated with corporate accounts in the replies, with businesses like Crumbl Cookies, Dunkin’ and Walmart hurrying to comment so their brands could be aligned with Swift’s monolithic capitalist image. Cringey corporate memes and a swath of orange-hued profile pictures followed, with Adweek publishing a guide to the consumerist chaos. After the organic success of Charli XCX’s “Brat” led to brand accounts co-opting that album’s lime green color scheme and sans-serif typeface, it’s no surprise that the trend is continuing with Swift.

But Swift and these corporations are symbiotic. Swift’s enormous fanbase has proven time and again that they will follow her wherever she goes, and more importantly, buy whatever she puts out. She has commodified herself to such an extent that brands leap to associate themselves with her. And because Swift’s fanbase is its own controlled revenue stream, corporations stand to make a buck if they can successfully make their image synonymous with Swift’s.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce on New Heights podcast. pic.twitter.com/qeOrHBlY7z

— Pop Base (@PopBase) August 13, 2025

Because she’s made herself the big, blonde sun we all orbit around, Swift was free to let the hype roll in while she readied her next move. There were two days between Swift revealing the album title (with the cover art blurred) in the initial “New Heights” teaser and the episode itself. In that time, a countdown appeared on her website that corresponded to the episode’s release. In the meantime, fans could preorder the album in various formats, or click an “add all to cart” button to simplify the process for hoarders — sorry, collectors. When the full, two-hour episode of “New Heights” dropped August 13, the album’s standard cover art was revealed, and three additional vinyl variants were made available for preorder. At the same time, viewership of the episode’s live premiere soared past other popular podcasts and smashed the show’s previous records in less than a day. What was a relatively modest announcement for Swift became a boon for the Kelce brothers, with the “New Heights” YouTube channel growing its subscriber base by hundreds of thousands in just over a week. Swift’s appearance in the “New Heights” studio was not just a casual drop-by, but a joint marketing effort intended to benefit multiple parties.

For her part, Swift played coy. “I think we all know that if there’s one thing male sports fans want to see in their spaces and on their screens, it’s more of me,” Swift joked at the top of the show. And while that quip might reflect the boos that Swift received at this year’s Super Bowl, it doesn’t exactly echo her impact on the sports world at large. Since Swift and Kelce began dating in late 2023, television ratings spiked whenever Swift was in attendance at a game, as did sales for game-day tickets and merchandise like official team jerseys. Though Swift might incur some ire from football traditionalists, her entrée into the sports world has grown her audience and popularized the NFL on a global scale, unlike ever before. When Swift dated actors and musicians, those were areas of culture that she and her fanbase were already steeped in. But in her high-profile relationship with arguably the most famous football player in the country, Swift has made the sectors of culture she was once absent from into her domain. What’s profitable for Swift — either in terms of literal money or cultural notoriety — is just as lucrative for Kelce. In hindsight, it should’ve been easy to see that the only thing the all-American singer needed for the next stage of her ascent was a football-playing homecoming king.

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But it wasn’t just the news that Swift was on “New Heights” that made waves; it was that Swift was doing a podcast at all. As fans quickly pointed out, Swift has never been a guest on any other podcast throughout her long career. (Though, it is worth noting that the medium began to take off right around the time Swift started to shy away from doing formal press, coinciding with the 2017 release of “Reputation” and a public reckoning with her image.) The closest thing Swift had done to a podcast was the livestream event announcing 2012’s “Red,” which has a paltry two million views compared to the “New Heights” episode’s 19 million and counting. No matter how strange it might seem for a star of Swift’s caliber to announce her new album on a podcast of all places, it’s an undeniably savvy marketing play. YouTube is quickly becoming one of the top media destinations for viewers, and Swift understands that a video podcast is far less ephemeral than a mere press release or Instagram post.

The decision to appear on “New Heights” also fits into another Swiftian trope: the desire to remain in control of the narrative. Since the “Reputation” era, Swift has made martyrdom into a billion-dollar industry, a smart move further aided by her public enemy, Scooter Braun, purchasing her master recordings in 2019. In the years-long struggle to regain control of her masters, Swift played up her role as the target of a cruel plan, concocted by a man who wanted to govern a woman’s art. This stretch of her career was capped by the Eras Tour, a live celebration of Swift’s life’s work, during which she put out multiple re-recordings of her music. The tour might’ve been a gargantuan success, but it also exhausted a sect of the public who didn’t care about 24/7 Swift-mania. As a result, “The Tortured Poets Department” only spawned one moderately successful single and received subpar reviews (at least by Swift’s standards).

(Patrick Smith/Getty Images) Travis Kelce celebrates with Taylor Swift after a 17-10 victory against the Baltimore Ravens on January 28, 2024, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Though not a stumble by most people’s measure, Swift doesn’t like her footing to be unstable. She’s quietly looking to regain an appealing level of accessibility, one that requires a low lift and looks down-to-earth, like being on a podcast. She’s not taking a step down from the world’s biggest stages; she’s simply pivoting to face the camera. “I’m in the business of human emotion,” Swift says during the show, cunningly nodding to the way she’s commodified her feelings and made a profit on relatability. And at this point in her career, a two-hour podcast talking straight to fans only fuels the parasocial relationship that she’s built with them, thus bolstering her star back into the stratosphere without forcing anyone to watch it rise.

What’s more, “New Heights” is a controlled environment where Swift can manage the questions, framing and larger narrative to ensure nothing strays from the story she’s built, something that’s not always possible in traditional interviews. When Swift says, for example, that industry trades said her re-recordings were “a bad idea” that “nobody would be interested in,” neither Kelce balks despite the statement being unfounded. It does, however, fit neatly into the story Swift has been peddling about the project since 2022, as does her claim that she never thought about partnering with Shamrock Holdings, which purchased her masters in 2020, despite posting an open letter that same year stating otherwise.

But all cynicism and nitpicking aside, it is admittedly fascinating to see Swift sit down for an extended period to talk about her life and career. The level of fame she’s attained might translate to enormous financial success, but it’s also kept Swift frustratingly isolated from the vulnerability in her art. Whether “New Heights” marks a change in the way Swift chooses to do interviews, or if it’s solely another brilliant business move designed to resemble marketable candor, remains to be seen. But one can only hope for the former. I want feathered hats, scraping the “Call Her Daddy” studio ceilings, and Terry Gross counting the number of sequins on a bodysuit during a very special episode of “Fresh Air.” If we’re all going to be forced to live the life of this showgirl forever, delivering a bit of that promised glitz outside of a football podcast would be a good place to start.