How Taylor Swift’s engagement to Travis Kelce inspired ‘The Life of a Showgirl’

Taylor Swift feared her songwriting would "dry up" once she was "truly happy".

The 35-year-old pop idol has just released her 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl”, and as she's happier than ever - having just got engaged to her longtime partner Travis Kelce - Swift was concerned she'd have nothing to write about, because she'd always assumed she was a tortured poet.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 1 “Breakfast With Greg James” about her follow-up to 2024's “The Tortured Poets Department”, she said: “It’s wonderful. I used to kind of have this dark fear that if I ever were truly happy and free, being myself and nurtured by a relationship, what happens if the writing just dries up?

“What if writing is directly tied to my torment and pain? And it turns out that’s not the case at all, and we just were catching lightning in a bottle with this record.”

Many of Swift's albums have included manifestations about the future, but this time, she focused on the present.

She said: “With this album, my life is in exactly the same spot as when I wrote the record.”

Swift reunited with pop producers Max Martin and Shellback on the record, and since the last time she'd worked with the pair, she has honed the art of creating characters.

“The Actually Romantic” singer explained: “I made this album with Max Martin and Shellback, who I hadn’t worked with in maybe seven or eight years.

“In the time that we kind of took a break from working together, we were all out there honing powers of different types, and one of the things that I was really playing with in our time away was writing in character, and kind of developing these characters and these character arcs and things – and that is present on this record.

“Even though it’s about my life, sometimes you cosplay, like, this is a love song through the lens of Elizabeth Taylor’s life.

“There’s different motifs that I think we’re trying out on this record that are sort of a culmination of me practicing and working up to the point where I could make this type of album.”

Meanwhile, Swift has also praised Kelce as her "hot" best friend.

“The Cruel Summer” singer recently got engaged to the Kansas City Chiefs tight end after more than two years of dating, and she thinks he's the ultimate "goal" in what she was looking for in a partner.

In another interview on the Hits Radio Breakfast Show, she said: "He's a blast. He's just the most fun person, the life of any party, even when it's just us. That’s the goal, isn't it? Find a best friend who you think is hot."

The singer is close friends with Ed Sheeran and admitted that it is likely he will perform at her and Kelce's wedding because he loves performing so much.

Asked if Sheeran will be her wedding singer, she said: "I mean it would be hard to keep him from it, I think! That's the thing he's like, 'I'm always being asked to sing at weddings', and you're like, 'Ed, if there's a stage, you know that you'll be on it!'

"He knows what people want, and he wants to give people what they want. That's the fun thing about our friendship is we both love performing and we love writing, and we love singing.

"It's actually not that hard to talk either of us into performing at anything!"

Swift has no social media apps on her phone because she hates to waste time "scrolling" when she has so many hobbies and knows she will eventually see anything important anyway.

She said, "I am really not much of a scroller at all. I don't have the apps on my phone or anything else. It's really effective, right? They know what I want to see, and they're going to show it to me, so I'd rather just spend those hours doing something else or baking.

"I have a lot of hobbies, and I didn't really have as many hobbies when I spent a lot of time scrolling. It's been so much fun mandating a different relationship with social media when there's so much of any type of opinion about me, it's like, don't put that in my brain."