Taylor Swift’s ‘New Heights’ podcast hits major milestone

Taylor Swift’s latest appearance on the New Heights Show podcast has become a viral moment, racking up 13 million views on YouTube within just 24 hours.

The August 13 episode, co-hosted by her boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother Jason, saw Swift reveal major news, her next album, The Life of a Showgirl, will be released on October 3. 

She also debuted the cover art and shared the tracklist, which includes a collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter on the title track.

Swift explained that the inspiration for the album came from the happiness she experienced while performing on the Eras Tour. 

“This album is about what was going on behind the scenes of my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant,” she said. 

“It just comes from the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life, and so that effervescence has come through on this record. And like you said, bangers.”

The excitement around her appearance was so intense that the livestream on YouTube crashed about an hour and 44 minutes into the show, though fans quickly switched to platforms like Apple, Amazon, Spotify, and Usery. 

At the time of the interruption, the YouTube stream had peaked at 1.3 million concurrent viewers.

The Life of a Showgirl marks Swift’s 12th studio album and will feature 12 tracks with no bonus songs or extended versions planned. 

Reflecting on the difference from her last project, she said, “With Tortured Poets Department, I was like here’s a data dump of everything I thought, felt, experienced in two or three years."

"Here’s 31 songs. This is 12. There’s not a 13th, there’s not other ones coming. This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time," she continued. 

Swift added, "I also wanted it to be every single song is on this album for hundreds of reasons, and you couldn’t take one out and it be the same album, you couldn’t add one and be… It’s just right.”