Taylor Swift is clearly not a fan of a certain online theory about how getting married to Travis Kelce is going to hurt her career.
The singer was asked during a BBC Radio 2 interview with Scott Mills (watch it below) whether her record-smashing new album The Life of a Showgirl was going to be her last now that she’s engaged to the Kansas City Chiefs tight end.
“Taylor, don’t tell me this is your last album,” Mills asked, in a rather sly bit of phrasing.
“What? No …” Swift replied, a bit taken aback.
“I just saw some fans going, ‘Well, she’s going to get married and then she’s going to have children and [so this is] going to be the last album,’” he explained.
“A shockingly offensive thing to say,” Swift replied with a chuckle. “That’s not why people get married — so they can quit their job. It’s also, like, music for me —”
“I think fans were just panicking,” Mills interjected.
“Oh, I know, they love to panic sometimes, but I love the person that I am with because he loves what I do, and he loves how much I am fulfilled by making art and making music,” she said. “That’s the coolest thing about Travis. He is so passionate about what he does that me being passionate about what I do … it connects us.”
Continued Swift: “There’s no point in time where he’s going to be like, ‘I’m really upset that you’re still making the music … the music thing that I signed up for, that I know you love, I thought you were going to stop doing that …’ We both — as a living, as a job, as a passion — perform for three and a half hours in NFL stadiums.”
The question also glances at something that’s being debated among music critics in the press, and among fans — namely, is Swift’s happier existence conducive to making great music? (“Do We Still Like Taylor Swift When She’s Happy?” asked a headline in The New Yorker, which delved into some of the virulent, and misogynistic, online discourse around the subject.)
This isn’t a topic that’s remotely new or isolated to Swift, of course, as many artists of various disciplines have wrestled with the question of whether misery is a necessary ingredient for great art. In Swift’s case, however, most seem to agree that Showgirl is a clear step up from her melancholy last album, the aptly named Tortured Poets Department. But it sure seems like a no-win scenario when Swift’s last album was criticized as too downbeat and her latest gets characterized as hindered by happiness.
“The cool thing about [Showgirl] is that I’m in a very similar space in my life as when I wrote it and now that I’m putting it out — which is a nice when those things are not incongruent,” she said. “The last record, I was in such a different place when I wrote it — just miserable. And then when I put it out, I was so happy. So it was like, ‘I love this art. I love this beautiful art about misery. I, however, am not miserable anymore.’ So it feels weird to talk about the record because it’s like you can be proud of the work, but you can also just not relate to that person you were.”
Swift was also asked about keeping the album such a closely guarded secret despite flying back and forth to Sweden during her Eras tour to record the project with producers Max Martin and Shellback.
“My friends don’t rat,” she explained. “They do not rat. And you can tell by the amount of stories about me that are out there that are absolutely not true because all of my friends — all of my friends — had heard music [from the new album] a year ago. They know what’s going on with me. They do not snitch. It is phenomenal.”
Showgirl immediately broke Swift’s sales record upon its release last week, selling 2.7 million copies in its first day, which puts it on track to become the biggest-selling album in a single week of all time. Amazon Music also reported it’s their most streamed album of all time for a single day.
