Taylor Swift is Time’s Person of the Year — and we’re being rewarded with new details.
As the magazine’s 96th recipient of the honor, she becomes the face of Time’s next issue, participated in a photo shoot, and is featured in a cover story penned by the outlet’s West Coast editor Sam Lansky.
The lengthy profile on Swift — spanning about 7,000 words — acknowledges the artist’s success over the years while giving fans a new peek behind the curtain.
Over the span of months, Swift and Lansky had candid conversations — including in Swift’s home — about her personal life, her career over the years, and The Eras Tour.
Here’s what we learned.
1. Her first major tour opportunity with Kenny Chesney was canceled, but he made it up to her
At 17, Swift had booked an opening slot on tour for country star Kenny Chesney. “This was going to change my career,” she recalled to Time. “I was so excited.” But weeks later, she was told she could no longer perform. The tour was sponsored by a beer company and Swift was underage. She described being devastated.
But months later, Swift received a card from Chesney for her 18th birthday.
It read: “I’m sorry that you couldn’t come on the tour, so I wanted to make it up to you.” And it came with a check for “more money than I’d ever seen in my life,” Swift said. She paid her band bonuses and paid for tour buses with the windfall. “I was able to fuel my dreams.”
2. Stars including Stevie Nicks weigh in on her
“I don’t give Taylor advice about being famous,” Stevie Nicks told Time. “She doesn’t need it.”
It’s later revealed that Nicks sent Swift a Stevie Nicks Barbie that she keeps boxed in her kitchen.
Phoebe Bridgers discussed Swift’s songwriting talents. “She’s like a whole room of writers as one person, with that voice and charisma,” Bridgers said.
Filmmaker Greta Gerwig said of Swift: “I’m just a sucker for a gal who is good with words, and she is the best with them.” She called Swift “Bruce Springsteen meets Loretta Lynn meets Bob Dylan.”
3. She trained hardcore for The Eras Tour
Swift’s Eras Tour is a feat — shows are more than three hours long and feature 40-plus songs and 16 costume changes.
“I knew this tour was harder than anything I’d ever done before by a long shot,” she told Time.
Swift said she began training six months ahead of opening night.
“Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud,” she said. “Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs.”
Time reported that Swift’s gym, Dogpound, created a strength and conditioning program for her. After that, she had three months of dance training. “I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought,” she said.
4. Swift stays in bed the day after a weekend run of shows
Swift’s shows are consecutive back-to-back performances over the weekend. So she’ll take the following day to rest.
“I do not leave my bed except to get food and take it back to my bed and eat it there,” she told Time. “It’s a dream scenario. I can barely speak because I’ve been singing for three shows straight.” Then she’ll return to her workout routine throughout the week.
5. Swift and Travis Kelce were dating for a while before that first football game
“This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” she told Time about how they got together. “We started hanging out right 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. By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple.”
In July, Kelce said on an episode of New Heights that he tried — and failed — to give Swift a friendship bracelet with his phone number at her Eras Tour stop in Kansas City.
“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,” Swift told Time. She first attended a game in late September.
The interview also marks Swift’s first time speaking at length about her new flame.
6. Her ‘Reputation’ album is coming and the tracks are ‘fire’
Swift calls the Reputation portion of the tour a “goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure.”
She told Time that the upcoming vault tracks for the re-recorded album will be “fire.”
And she described the re-recording project as a mythical quest.
“I’m collecting horcruxes,” she said. “I’m collecting infinity stones. Gandalf’s voice is in my head every time I put out a new one. For me, it is a movie now.”
