Taylor Swift is the 2023 TIME Person of the Year. Obviously. It doesn’t matter if you’re the type who made friendship bracelets til your fingers cramped or if you are 60-something straight male football fan, you’ve heard Taylor Swift’s name a lot this year. Yes, you can whine and say that it was all “against your will” or “you don’t really like her music,” but facts are facts.
Her TIME Person of the Year article gives new info, something Taylor doesn’t do on the regular, including her post-show routine, couple quotes about Kim Kardashian and He Who Shall Not Be Named, and why she thinks Travis Kelce is “metal as hell” (a phrase I hope doesn’t catch on with GenZ).
Time Magazine: We’d like to name you Person of the Yea-
Me: Can I bring my cat. https://t.co/SOhkYKSTwG
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) December 6, 2023
Fun Facts
Friendship bracelets traded by her fans at concerts became a hot accessory, with one line in a song causing as much as a 500% increase in sales at craft stores.
There are at least 10 college classes devoted to her, including one at Harvard; the professor, Stephanie Burt, tells TIME she plans to compare Swift’s work to that of the poet William Wordsworth.
Sports!
When Swift started dating Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chief and two-time Super Bowl champion, his games saw a massive increase in viewership.
When Eras kicked off in Glendale, Ariz., she generated more revenue for its businesses than the 2023 Super Bowl, which was held in the same stadium.
Tour Deets
“I knew this tour was harder than anything I’d ever done before by a long shot,” Swift says. Each show spans over 180 minutes, including 40-plus songs from at least nine albums; there are 16 costume changes, pyrotechnics, an optical illusion in which she appears to dive into the stage and swim, and not one but two cottagecore worlds, which feature an abundance of moss.
In the past, Swift jokes, she toured “like a frat guy.” This time, she began training six months ahead of the first show. “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.” Her gym, Dogpound, created a program for her, incorporating strength, conditioning, and weights. “Then I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones,” she says. “I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought.”
She worked with choreographer Mandy Moore—recommended by her friend Emma Stone, who worked with Moore on La La Land—since, as Swift says, “Learning choreography is not my strong suit.” With the exception of Grammy night—which was “hilarious,” she says—she also stopped drinking. “Doing that show with a hangover,” she says ominously. “I don’t want to know that world.”
Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) is TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year https://t.co/oyjR55azCZ pic.twitter.com/m2qbIbd5TX
— TIME (@TIME) December 6, 2023
How Does She Possibly Recover?
After she plays a run of shows, Swift takes a day to rest and recover. “I do not leave my bed except to get food and take it back to my bed and eat it there,” she says. “It’s a dream scenario. I can barely speak because I’ve been singing for three shows straight. Every time I take a step my feet go crunch, crunch, crunch from dancing in heels.”
Visuals of Taylor’s House
Things she loves in her apartment: a Stevie Nicks Barbie that sits still boxed in her kitchen, sent to her by the artist; the framed note from Paul McCartney that hangs in her bathroom; tiles around the fireplace that Swift found shopping in Paris with her mother. Connections to her family are everywhere, including a striking photo of her grandmother Marjorie, an opera singer and the inspiration for a track on her album evermore.
Kim x He Who Shall Not Be Named
“You have 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,” she says. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. 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.”
Taylor Swift: “Life is short. Have adventures. Me locking myself away in my house for a lot of years—I’ll never get that time back. I’m more trusting now than I was six years ago” https://t.co/jZTW1UBlMQ pic.twitter.com/h8WwYvmcYx
— TIME (@TIME) December 6, 2023
Shoutout To Kelly Clarkson
Around the same time, she started thinking about rerecording her old albums in an effort to wrest back control. “I’d run into Kelly Clarkson and she would go, ‘Just redo it,’” Swift says. “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.”
Travis, Baby, Travis.
“I don’t know how they know what suite I’m in,” she says. “There’s a camera, like, a half-mile away, and you don’t know where it is, and you have no idea when then camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don’t know if I’m being shown 17 times or once.” She is sensitive to the attention that’s put on her when she shows up. “I’m just there to support Travis,” she says. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”
“Football is awesome, it turns out,” Swift says playfully. “I’ve been missing out my whole life.”
This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” she says. “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. 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.”
“When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m 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 says. “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.”
Taylor & Beyoncé Against The World
“There were so many stadium tours this summer, but the only ones that were compared were me and Beyoncé,” she says. “Clearly it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other, even when those two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion.”
Taylor Swift on re-recording her old albums: “I’m collecting horcruxes. 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” https://t.co/uCMz751T6l pic.twitter.com/FHo4h13oVm
— TIME (@TIME) December 6, 2023
Next Up: Reputation, Taylor’s Version
“It’s a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure,” she says, laughing. “I think a lot of people see it and they’re just like, Sick snakes and strobe lights.” The upcoming vault tracks for Reputation will be “fire,” she promises. The rerecordings project feels like a mythical quest to her. “I’m collecting horcruxes,” she says. “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.”
