No, Taylor Swift is not headlining the Super Bowl halftime show next year, but it’s not because the NFL wouldn’t allow her to own her performance footage.
During an appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” on Monday, Swift revealed that the reason she wouldn’t headline the show — aside from there being “no official offer” for her to perform — is because she’s too “locked in” on the game to focus on her own performance.
“I am in love with a guy who does that sport on that actual field. That is violent chess. That is gladiators without swords. That is dangerous,” Swift explained, referencing her fiancé, Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs.
“The whole season I am locked in on what that man is doing on the field,” she continued. “Can you imagine if he was out there every single week, putting his life on the line, doing this very dangerous, very high-pressure, high-intensity sport, and I’m like, ‘I wonder what my choreo should be?’”
Swift, who was there to promote her new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” made the comments during a game with Fallon, in which the host read five internet rumors about Swift and had to guess which ones were true.
“Taylor Swift, you turned down the Super Bowl halftime show because the NFL wouldn’t allow you to own your performance footage,” Fallon said, reading the first rumor.
Swift said Jay-Z’s team has called her team before asking if she is interested. (Roc Nation, the entertainment company founded by Jay-Z, produces the halftime show.)
“Jay-Z has always been very good to me. Our teams are very close,” she said. However, the conversations have never been an “official offer, or a conference room conversation.”
She said her team is always able to be truthful in her reasoning for passing on the opportunity.
Last month, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell didn’t rule out the possibility of Swift headlining the coveted performance. However, it was later announced that Bad Bunny would assume the role next year.
The inspo behind each ‘Showgirl’ track
Fallon and Swift also played some of her new songs, giving Swift the chance to explain the meaning behind some of her fresh hits.
“The Fate of Ophelia” tells the story of Hamlet’s bride-to-be, who died after being lovesick, but in Swift’s version, she’s rescued from her melancholy by a man she truly loves. While creating the song, she said she felt the same rush she had while writing “You Belong With Me.”
As for “Opalite,” which Swift explained is man-made opal, she said the song is about the fact that life is not always going to give you what you want, but “you have to pick your own happiness.”
“This song is exactly how I feel right now,” Swift said.
Swift said she designed the chorus of “Wi$h Li$t” to showcase her “happy place” and said “Wood” is about “superstitions” and it started “in a very innocent place.”
Elizabeth Taylor is an icon and role model to Swift, as someone who was constantly criticized but continued to create art, which she said inspired the track by the same name.
“The Life of a Showgirl,” the album’s final song, which features Sabrina Carpenter, focuses on the idea that “you don’t know the life of a showgirl,” a lyric repeated throughout. She said she immediately thought of including Carpenter on the song because she’s playful and a showgirl herself.
Finally, “Father Figure” explores the relationship between a protégé and a mentor, written from the mentor’s perspective, and how the power dynamic can shift. She said she also relates to the perspective of the protégé, despite the song taking the view of the mentor.
The song was inspired by “Succession” character Logan Roy, specifically the moment when he looks at his kids and says, “I love you, but you’re not serious people.”
“I think about that scene constantly,” Swift said. “I just think it’s one of the coolest scenes ever, and I was like, ‘I want to write a song that has that energy of sort of, like, Logan Roy being like, ‘You bit the hand that fed you.’”
“The spice level is high on this album,” Swift said.
Swift also discussed “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” which dropped Friday and was in theaters for one weekend only. The film featured the music video premiere for “The Fate of Ophelia.”
One thing Swift said she loved about making the video was that it reunited her Eras Tour team, including the tour dancers, as performers in her music video. It was meant to hint at the tour, as filming scenes in one take gives a live-performance feel, Swift said.
Kelce designed Swift’s engagement ring solo
Mid-conversation, Fallon said he became “blinded” by something: the rock on Swift’s finger.
After asking for a close-up of the antique cushion-cut stone (“Taylor, that is insanity!” Fallon said), Fallon asked about Kelce’s involvement in picking out the ring.
Swift admitted that her beau put a lot of work into choosing her engagement ring and that he had it for some time before he proposed to her over the summer.
Kelce worked with a jeweler, Kindred Lubeck, to customize and create the ring, Swift told Fallon. In an interview Friday on Heart Radio, Swift said she showed Kelce a video of Lubeck’s work over a year ago “and he was just paying attention to everything, it turns out.”
She said in the Heart Radio interview that when she saw the ring, she immediately knew who made it and that Kelce had listened to her so long ago.
“I didn’t know what I would want, but he did, somehow, and that’s kind of a flex,” Swift told Heart Radio hosts Jamie Theakston and Emma Bunton.
She told Fallon, “I look at it constantly. It doesn’t feel in any way normal for me.”
The news of Swift and Kelce’s engagement came shortly after she announced her new album on his podcast, “New Heights,” in August, in what was her first sit-down on a podcast.
Swift revealed that while the couple were recording the show at Kelce’s house, he had a team of people transforming his backyard into what became the setting for the proposal — and what she later called a “secret garden oasis.”
While recording, Swift said Kelce seemed nervous “about the podcast” and that he told her his heart was racing.
“I’ve never seen this dude nervous. Ever. He’s like, professionally not a nervous person,” Swift said she recalled thinking.
After they finished up, Swift said Kelce asked her if she wanted to go to the backyard to have a glass of wine (“I’m always gonna wanna do that,” Swift said), and when she walked outside, she said she realized why all of the curtains were drawn and why he was nervous.
Swift told Fallon that Kelce is her “favorite person I’ve ever met.”
“The fact that this is the person that I get to hang out with every day forever is just like, that’s the whole thing of it,” Swift continued. “You look at [the ring] and you’re like, ‘I get to hang out with him forever,’ and this represents that.”
The end of the ‘Taylor’s Version’ era
It’s no secret Swift is on a roll this year. Earlier, she announced that she had the chance to buy back the masters to her first six albums, ones that she had been in the process of “re-recording” to own the rights to her full discography — a quest she has been on for years.
“The fact that this happened still feels absolutely outlandish to me, because I kind of had made peace with the fact that I was going to re-record my music, I was going to try to replicate these songs as accurately and exactly as possible and that was just what I was going to do, because nobody had given me the opportunity to bid on my work before,” Swift told Fallon.
When she used to see old music videos she is proud of, or when she glanced at the album art of one of her first six albums, she would get sad, she said, “and I had to sort of create this protective layer of not really letting them in” because “you don’t own it and you never will.”
Now, she said she has had to “reroute my entire absorption system of my own work to be just stoked whenever I see any of it — and it’s the best feeling in the world.”
Swift acknowledged that the masters debacle was a “new topic of conversation” for the general public, as these negotiations typically occur behind closed doors, and she thanked fans for being so supportive of her mission, despite being unfamiliar with the process.
“Every artist doesn’t have to care about owning their music,” Swift clarified. “But I just wanted them to know this is a thing, and if you do care about it, negotiate to have it.”
Swift will continue her “Showgirl” media tour Thursday with an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”