Taylor Swift's year just keeps getting bigger and better, as the artist has just been named TIME's person of the year.
Unofficially, 2023 was the year of girl and all things girl-coded and Swift played a major role in that. From Greta Gerwig's billion-dollar feminist take on "Barbie" and Beyoncé's showcase of Black queer liberation at the Renaissance tour to Swift's billion-dollar economy-reviving Eras tour — all intersected to create “a three-part summer of feminine extravaganza.”
Even Swift herself said that the success of girly things is a sign of changing times. She listed: "Girlhood, feelings, love, breakups, analyzing those feelings, talking about them nonstop, glitter, sequins! We’ve been taught that those things are more frivolous than the things that stereotypically gendered men gravitate toward, right?” But now "if we’re going to look at this in the most cynical way possible, feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made. It’s extremely heartening.”
She added, “This is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been."
Here are six revelations about the pop star in her first interview in four years:
1
Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift were officially a couple before she first showed up at his game
Tayvis, or just simply Taylor and Travis, has taken the country by storm. In October, Swift began publically dating NFL star and Chief's tight end Travis Kelce. A star of America's favorite sport and arguably the country's most influential pop singer coupling up played out like modern-day fanfiction for Swifties and a nightmare for football bros and conservatives. Swift said to TIME: “I’m just there to support Travis . . . [and] "have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”
Swift admitted that while most of their relationship has played out publicly, she revealed that when Kelce put her on the spot on his podcast, they began seeing each other privately immediately after that.
“So we actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other," she said. "By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple. I think some people think that they saw our first date at that game? We would never be psychotic enough to hard launch a first date.”
She said that the public nature of their relationship doesn't deter her from "going to see him do what he loves. We’re showing up for each other, other people are there and we don’t care,” she said. “The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone. And we’re just proud of each other.”
2
Kelly Clarkson inspired Swift to rerecord her albums
Swift's current pop culture moment mostly stems from the rerecordings of her previous albums, cleverly renamed Taylor's Version. The singer lost ownership of most of her music catalog when her former label Big Machine Records sold it for a reported $140 million to music manager Scooter Braun. The music manager shaped the careers of stars like Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande but no longer represents them.
“With the Scooter thing, my masters were being sold to someone who actively wanted them for nefarious reasons, in my opinion," she said. But to regain some control over her music, another pop powerhouse Kelly Clarkson told her to "'just redo it.'"
"My dad kept saying it to me too. I’d look at them and go, ‘How can I possibly do that?’ Nobody wants to redo their homework if on the way to school, the wind blows your book report away," she said.
Because of her rerecorded albums, Billboard reported that the singer is the first person to hold five of the Top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 chart. Swift released "Speak Now (Taylor's Version)" and "1989 (Taylor's Version)" this year.
The singer's next rerecording is "Reputation (Taylor's Version)." Swift said that the era is "a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure."
3
She still resents the Kim Kardashian and Kanye West scandal
Every Swiftie remembers where they were when Kanye West interrupted Swift's 2009 VMA win for video of the year. Neither musician had any idea it would shape the discourse around their careers for a decade after the incident. But after apologies were made, the beef everyone thought had been laid to rest was resuscitated in 2016. West had written the song "Famous" with the line "I made that b***h famous" referring to Swift and claimed that she consented to it. Swift denied this. But Kanye's then-wife Kim Kardashian leaked an audio conversation of the singer that seemingly "proved" that Swift agreed to the lyrics of the song. The audio went viral, and as a result, Swift was labeled a snake.
Swift said that the scandal felt like “a career death . . . Make no mistake — my career was taken away from me.”
Looking back, Swift called the incident "a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar.”
4
The 2016 scandal drove her to become a recluse
As a result of the 2016 scandal, Swift had become publicly unpopular. She said that it “took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before."
It even drove her to become a recluse. It was also when she met her longtime ex-boyfriend and British actor Joe Alwyn, and the couple sheltered in secret together. It was during this time that she "moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year."
Swift described herself at the time as very paranoid and withdrawn: "I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
5
"Mastermind" is based on Paul Thomas Anderson's movie "Phantom Thread"
Swift is known for the Easter eggs she plants for fans, and they tend to be pretty elaborate, prompting Swifties online to call her a genius. So it only makes sense that Swift would write a song called "Mastermind" on her 10th album "Midnights."
In the song, she reveals some intimate fears about her overanalytical brain, singing:
“No one wanted to play with me as a little kid
So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since
To make them love me and make it seem effortless
This is the first time I’ve felt the need to confess
And I swear I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian because I care.”
Moreover, she said she wrote the song after watching Paul Thomas Anderson's historical drama "Phantom Thread." In the film, it is revealed that the protagonist has been plotting against her love interest for a while.
“Remember that last scene?” Swift said. “I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to have a lyric about being calculated?” She pauses. “It’s something that’s been thrown at me like a dagger, but now I take it as a compliment.”
6
The singer was sober throughout Eras tour except for Grammy night
The sprawling and lucrative billion-dollar tour required Swift to hop through all her different album eras, which include 10 albums and more than 40 songs.
To prep for the intensity on the tour she would "run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud,” she said. This meant the singer trained for three months and that meant staying sober the whole time so that she could continue to perform at such a high level.
But the singer did allow herself to cheat on the strict regimen at the Grammys. Swift went viral that night for dancing the night away to Bad Bunny and winning her 12th Grammy.
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