See Taylor Swift's First Appearance On Travis Kelce's 'New Heights' Podcast
Swift's masterful marketing machine kicked into high gear on Monday night when her website transformed into a glittering orange spectacle, complete with a countdown timer ticking toward 12:12 AM on August 12. The numerical symbolism wasn't lost on devoted Swifties, who've learned to decode every easter egg the artist drops.
Meanwhile, Taylor Nation flooded its Instagram account with a carousel of 12 carefully selected Eras Tour images, alongside the tantalising caption: 'Thinking about when she said "See you next era..."'. The easter eggs kept coming when Swift's appearance on boyfriend Travis Kelce's New Heights podcast was announced for Wednesday, featuring a silhouette traced back to her December 12, 2022 Variety interview — connected to her All Too Well short film from November 12, 2021.
When the countdown hit zero, Swift's website predictably crashed under the weight of millions of eager fans before re-booting with sparse details about the mysterious new project. While The Life of a Showgirl lacks an official release date, pre-orders indicate shipping by October 13, though Swift's team emphasises this isn't the actual release date.
It was the star's appearance on her partner's podcast, however, that delivered the money shot: in a teaser clip Swift dramatically opens a briefcase to reveal a blurred vinyl while declaring, 'This is my brand new album, The Life of a Showgirl,' as Jason Kelce's screams provided the perfect soundtrack to the moment.
Swift's appearance on New Heights marks her debut podcast interview, with the podcast's official Instagram teaser showing Swift and Travis exchanging playful remarks where she complimented the colour of his blue hoodie, which he replied to with a sweet, 'It's the colour of your eyes, sweetie'. The video finished with Swift saying they were about to 'do a fucking podcast'. Even the clip length, a precise 13 seconds, was an Easter egg for those fluent in Swift's number lore.
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Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years' worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
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This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Fellowship and its sequels became a template for what Hollywood success would look like over the next two decades. It showed executives that people were eager to see expensive, high-production value adaptations of intellectual property they already knew and loved, and that they would pay well for the privilege. It showed that audiences were willing to put up with a certain amount of lore — even labyrinthine lore — in exchange for high-stakes battles with a little artful CGI to make them look all the more epic. But Fellowship had a special resonance with its audience because of the moment in which it came out: a mere three months after September 11, 2001. It met an American audience ready and eager to throw themselves into the story of an epic battle between good and evil — one that good was definitely going to win. The parallels felt almost too good to be true. It met an American audience ready and eager to throw themselves into the story of an epic battle between good and evil — one that good was definitely going to win. 'With the world newly obsessed with the clash of good and evil, the time would seem to be ideal for 'The Lord of the Rings,'' mused Variety. 'Tolkien's tale of good people who band together against a Dark Lord and his minions has never been more timely than in our troubled age,' declared the New York Post. The Fellowship of the Ring introduced audiences to the peaceful, prosperous Shire, only to show them how its vulnerable borders left it open to attack by the faceless, subhuman hordes of the forces of evil. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, with its pacifist hobbit hero, is frequently read as an antiwar tract. But to an American audience that felt newly vulnerable and desperate for revenge, Jackson's Fellowship felt like a perfect allegory for why a 'war on terror' was not just desirable but in fact necessary. Writing in the New York Times in 2002, film critic Karen Durbin ran through the 'accidental echoes' between the Lord of the Rings films and the war on terror: 'Evil or 'Evildoers?' Sauron or Saddam? And how many towers?' The parallels were real. George W. Bush really did vow to rid the world of evil-doers, and Tolkien's characters really do spend a lot of time pontificating on the forces of evil. Incidentally, Lord of the Rings villain Sauron does sound a bit like former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and there is an unfortunate echo between the title of Tolkien's second volume, The Two Towers, and the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Even without those echoes, Durbin went on, there was an uncomfortable blurring between the spectacle of the films' battle sequences and military propaganda. 'Dehumanizing the other guy is the first step in training soldiers and fighting wars,' she wrote, decrying Jackson's plentiful scenes of animalistic and terrifying orcs marching on the small, scrappy fellowship. 'The danger is that this is what makes not just warfare palatable but extermination itself.' The interpretation of the whole Lord of the Rings franchise as an allegory of America's war on terror was so pervasive that when The Two Towers came out in 2002, Viggo Mortensen, the actor playing heroic Aragorn, spent a lot of his press tour trying to shut it down. 'I don't think that The Two Towers or Tolkien's writing or our work has anything to do with the United States' foreign ventures,' he said on Charlie Rose, 'and it upsets me to hear that.' (Tolkien, for the record, insisted that his story was 'neither allegorical nor topical' when the books' first audiences wanted to read it as a World War II narrative.) 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