Taylor Swift On The Life Of A Showgirl, The Eras Tours & Her Engagement! – Hw

I love the line where you’re like, “Just  give me a best friend who’s hot.” Just do   you think you’ve achieved that now with 100%. I’m  like, “Yeah, I got Look what I got. Oh my god,   the ring.” We are joined by someone who made  UK chart history this year as the first female   artist to achieve 13 number one albums in the UK.  She’s won Grammys, Brits, all the awards.

She made   history with her record-breaking eras tour.  She got her masters back. She’s a performer,   a businesswoman, an icon. We’re of course  talking about the showgirl herself, Taylor Swift. That was a great intro. That was good. You really  pulled out all the stops there, Flair. Beautifully   done.

You know what? We’re just really honored  that you took the time to come and see us and   have a tea. You know, you’re very busy. I mean,  you know, this is top priority. I I I wanted   to come see you guys. You’ve been so supportive  and so amazing. And got a new album coming out,   which just is it I I mean, it’s out. It’s out.  It’s incredible. We love it so much. We’ve been   listening this morning. Oh my goodness. I just  need a second cuz I can’t breathe.

Can we just   like Can we just pause? Really struggle to hold  this together. Uh, but on behalf of everybody   listening, I will try and ask you a question. Um,  I think we all have like an album or song of yours   that defines an era in our own lives, right? So  like for me, Midnights was a very healing era for   me. Like got me through some bad times.

What would  you say this era, this new album is for you? Well,   one thing about this album that I think is really  exciting is that oftentimes when I make a record,   we then take all this time to plan out how  we’re going to put it out and make sure that   we have vinyl for everybody. So, there’s like  a there’s like a lag time between when I made   it and when it enters the world.

Oftentimes,  your life can change drastically between that   this point and this other point. And for like for  example my last album, Tortured Post Department,   by the time that album came out, I was in  a completely different point in my life. So   it was like it’s an interesting feeling sometimes  putting albums out into the world. With this one,   the coolest part is that it is absolutely the  place that I still am in my life.

You know, the   music matches the moment that I’m in. So it’s it’s  so much easier to come in here and like talk about   music that completely accurately like reflects  what’s going on in my life. So that’s really fun.   I would say that this album is a complete and  total snapshot of what my life looks like right   now. Amazing.

Because I read that you you wrote it  kind of about what was happening behind the scenes   during the era tour. I mean, it sounds like there  was a lot happening behind the scenes during the   tour and a lot to be joyous about, but you know,  there’s there’s there’s there’s light and shade   in the in the songs that we heard for sure. Um,  like that tour being so huge for so many people,   was that one of the most intense experiences of  your life going? Yeah.

What was it about it, not   just the scale, but that made it so intense? Cuz,  you know, summing up almost summing up your whole   body of work in one performance must have been  extraordinary. Oh, it was a blast. It was so fun,   but it was also so many other things, you know,  like when you’re on tour for two years and every   night is a three and a half hour show. Whoa.

The  biggest threat um I I think one of my favorite   things that anyone like a mentor has said to me is  Stevie Nicks always said when it came to anything   in her personal life, she was like, “Just don’t  threaten my show. Don’t threaten my show.” My   main goal for two years was get myself to that  stage and and give everything to that crowd   wherever the crowd is for three and a half hours  every night. So, you’re combating.

You’re like,   “Don’t get sick. Yeah. Don’t let any outside  noise into your head. Focus on only this one   thing. If you do get sick, you’re doing the show  anyway. If you’re sore, you’re you’re injured,   you’re hurt, you’re pretending that you’re not and  doing the show anyway. And so, that was a really   really astonishing challenge. And I’m really  proud of of how we all handled it.

Not just me,   but also my band and my crew and my um my amazing  fellow performers on the stage. Like, every one of   those people has to be at the top of their game.  and and operating with that same mentality. So,   did you stop yourself from doom scrolling? Oh, I  really am not much of a scroller at all.

Like, I   don’t the rest of us. Yeah. I don’t have the apps  on my phone or else cuz it’s really effective,   right? Like they know what I want to see and  they’re going to show it to me. So, it’s like I’d   rather just spend like those hours doing something  else or like planning something fun for the fans   for for the way we’re going to put out this  album or baking or like I have a lot of hobbies.

Um, and I didn’t really have as many hobbies  when I spent a lot of time scrolling that. Oh,   really? So, you replaced scrolling with hobbies.  Yeah. Brilliant. It’s been so much fun like kind   of mandating a different relationship with with  social media. Like I I can get sent things and   like I can see I’ll see I’ll see everyone I’ll  see like your funny reels like you’re hilarious.

You’re great. You’re a great great follow. Um,  but yeah, like I think that when there’s so much   of any type of opinion about me, it’s like that’s  not don’t put that in my brain. Like anything you   put in your brain, it’s going to it’s going to  like internalize. I’m just like I I have a real   priority on being like peaceful and happy and all  the time, but not over something.

I’m not gonna   like, you know, have a messy like dramatic feeling  about something that doesn’t actually matter and   isn’t really real because there’s a lot of like  we live in a moment of like a lot of rage baiting   and a lot of like people are people like getting  attention has now been monetized.

So, you have to   just know like what world we live in and kind of  choose what reality you want to be in. Yeah. Now,   we have been loving loving the album. We’ve  listened to many a tune. My personal favorite   is Wish List. Oh, really? I said vibe. It’s a  straight up vibe. I was like lot of shoulders   lot of that. Oh, that makes me so happy.

That  was actually the last song that we finished on   the record and that was when I knew the record  was done. That was when I knew I was like we’re   boys are good guys. We’re good. I love the line  where you’re like just give me a best friend   who’s hot. Just do you think you’ve achieved that  now with 100%. I mean like look what I got. Oh my   god. The ring. Sorry. The ring. The ring is even  bigger in real life. Oh

my goodness. Oh. Oh my   goodness. Stunning. You would love him. You would  love him. I have a question actually. Does he have   any hot gay friends? Yeah. Yeah. Great. Okay. I’m  sorted out. I also have a lot of those as well in   the UK. It doesn’t matter. Yeah. I mean, I feel  this offline.

This feels like for maybe later,   you know, I get out my phone. But yeah, you would  absolutely love him. He’s a blast. He’s just the   most fun person life of any party, even when it’s  just us. So, it’s like, yeah, that is that is the   goal, isn’t it? Find a best friend who you  think is hot. Yeah. It’s like amazing. What   a combination. Somebody who makes you laugh and is  hot.

That is We have to say congratulations to you   on the engagement. It’s amazing. Um we spoke to Ed  actually Ed Sheeran a few weeks back and he told   us he’s constantly asked to perform at people’s  weddings. So is he singing at your wedding? Oh,   I mean it would be hard to keep him from it. I  think he has Yeah, he has that energy. The sad   thing is he’s like I’m always being asked to sing  at weddings.

It’s 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 That’s the fun thing about  um our friendship is we both love performing and   we love writing and we love singing. So, it’s like  we’re like, “Oh, don’t make me sing.” All right.   You know what I mean? You will in your own piano.

You’re up there explaining to the house band,   you’re like, “Shake it off. It’s three chords.  We’re first we’re starting here. We’re going,   you know.” Um, but it’s it’s that’s the thing is  like we we love what we do. We love to get up on   stage. It’s actually not that hard to talk either  of us into performing at anything. I saw him last   weekend actually at a wedding of our one of our  best friends and we were just talking about how   much we love when he came out on stage with me at  Wembley during the ARS tour. Oh yeah.

and we were   talking about how when we’re in a room and we’re  like rehearsing or writing or working together,   there’s really like a sort of strange like mind  melt thing that happens between us two and we’ve   always had it. We always will. So, um he had  a great wedding like couple oh god what was   it like eight or eight years ago maybe? Yeah. In  the forest, you know, like a woods wedding.

Just   everything you want, wasn’t it? Um, I think it was  Time magazine person of the year. Um, big up. They   said, “Your lyrics give women and girls permission  to know that their internal voice matters.” And   I think that’s absolutely where your music comes  from.

And Opal Light is I think the song that we   all need right now because you’re saying like it’s  all right and a lot of us need that. Is that your   intention when you’re writing to like really hit  that connection? Thank you for saying that about   that song. I’m so glad you like that one. Oh,  it’s amazing because you say um when you know,   you know, but how do you know? Yeah.

So that that  song um was so much fun to write because it goes   through all these situations where oftentimes  in life when we when we go through something   that doesn’t work out whether it’s in our personal  life or in our friendships or in our career path   we oftenimes look at it as this like major setback  like we’ve taken a step back but actually I found   that so many of those instances in my life have  based on how you respond to it can catapult you   forward in growth in wisdom in perspective.

And  I think those are the things that I’ve tried to   like find to be the most attainable qualities and  the most aspirational qualities in growing up is   like can you react to certain situations in a way  that benefits you and the people around you and   essentially like acquire wisdom because of it.

And  so Opelite is a song about like kind of forgiving   yourself for having gone through something that  didn’t pan out the way you wanted it to. And it   because it says, you know, like all of all of the  perfect couples like would look at you and say   like when you know, you know, and when you don’t,  you don’t. And when you’re not in that situation,   when you don’t know, you know that you don’t  know. You know that you don’t know.

And so it’s   like it’s a it’s giving yourself permission  to like not have it all figured out or not   marry the first person you ever dated, you know,  like stuff like that. Like it’s I I’m just happy   that that song exists. And also like that chorus.  I’m really just stoked about how like absolutely   infectious and borderline narcotic it is. That is  exactly what it is. Shocking shocking melody.

So   we’re going to play the first single, The Fate of  Ailia. But before we do, can you please just give   us headlines on what it’s about? I just have this  fixation on Shakespeare characters that I fall in   love with and I can’t stand to see them meet  a tragic demise. I can I don’t want that to be   what happened to them because I like Wait, are you  talking about Ailia’s? She died.

What do you mean?   I was really excited to see what happened with  her and Hamlet. They seemed great. And I kind   of going back to like the song Love Story, which  I wrote when I was a teenager. I was just like,   I can’t watch Romeo and Juliet not work out.  What do you mean they both die? They don’t in   my version of things.

So, it’s just like you just  like turn you just like turn the movie off before   the bad ending. But this is a little bit like that  where the fate of Ailia talks about how, you know,   Oilia was driven mad by love and relatable.  It talks about the hook says like, you know,   you dug me out of my grave and saved my heart from  the fate of Oilia. So, it’s a love song and it’s   also just got one of like the catchiest post hook  kind of sections that I’m pretty proud of.

So,   oh my god, it’s I It’s crazy to talk about  this music. It’s been a secret for over a year.   I can’t believe we managed to get you on the show,  Taylor. Thank you for inviting me. And somehow   we managed to not ask any questions about wood,  which is an incredibly which is a whole other so   disappointed that you didn’t see next opportunity.  It’s a whole other chapter.

Go listen to that   right now. The life of a showgirl is out right  now. It’s Taylor Swift, everyone. Thanks, guys.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.