Since nothing Taylor Swift ever does is small, her two-hour conversation with boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother Jason Kelce on their “New Heights” podcast is a watershed moment for a media format that has already outlived the device it was named for.
By Thursday, Wednesday’s talk had already been seen more than 11.7 million times on YouTube. But that’s only a fraction of its circulation – clips distributed on Instagram, TikTok, X and elsewhere have received more than 400 million views, and the episode was also available for streaming on audio platforms. Swift, who infrequently gives interviews to journalists, revealed key information about her upcoming album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” and talked about her relationships with Travis Kelce and her family and her joy of gaining full control of her past work – a yearslong quest.
It was a revelation for fans with whom she’s primarily communicated through her music and social media Easter eggs, a treasure hunt of clues about what she’s doing professionally. “We have not heard Taylor speak in like a long-form interview like that in about five years,” Alex Antonides, a superfan from Dallas, told The Associated Press. “She’s never been in that comfortable of a situation, either. It’s always been like more professional, like a professional interviewer asking her questions. And then this is like with her boyfriend and his brother. So that was … an environment we’ve truly never seen her in before.”
Swift cemented a trend that’s been seen in recent years among entertainers, sports figures and politicians who seek to deliver particular messages. A visit to friendly faces for a long-form conversation beats questions from nosy, prying journalists. In this case, Swift and Travis Kelce locked arms and cooed at each other between admiring queries. “My boyfriend says,” Swift said in asides when Kelce laid things on too thick.
“The Kelce brothers have become the Barbara Walters of their generation,” said Nick Cicero, founder of Mondo Metrics, which studies the podcast industry.
Fans ate it up. “I think it’s really nice and refreshing, especially for a woman whose primary fan base is young women, to see somebody that is so celebratory of their partner and also not self-deprecating in a bad way, but also really admires what they do, and they don’t try to minimize that,” one fan, Britton Copeland, who goes by Britton Rae on TikTok, said in a Zoom interview.
