Taylor Swift Cries on Travis Kelce’s Podcast Retelling Saga of Buying Her Masters: ‘I Can’t Believe It Still’ | Video

Taylor Swift got emotional as she opened up for the first time about the process of buying back the master recordings of her first six albums.

The singer stopped by boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother Jason’s podcast “New Heights” podcast on Wednesday for a rare in-depth interview, during which she recounted in detail the experience of reclaiming the rights to her music, and why it was so important to her.

So to catch anyone up who doesn’t know about this saga, like I signed a record deal when I was 15, and I always kind of refer to it as I got my music back this summer. But I never owned my music at all,” Swift explained. “So traditionally, a lot of record deals are set up in a way artists don’t own what’s called their master recordings. Owning your master recordings means that you have complete control and power over distribution, licensing and essentially, the way your legacy is shaped. It’s a huge thing. It’s always been huge thing for me.”

The 14-time Grammy winner said she had been actively saving up since she was a teenager to buy the recordings back and recounted when her music was first sold that it “ripped” her heart out of her chest. In 2021, Swift set out to re-record her albums since it was the only way to own a piece of them. The “Taylor’s Version” of her albums became massive successes due to previously unreleased “Vault” tracks. However, the thought still prayed on her to get back her original recordings.

“I thought about not owning my music every day. It was like an intrusive thought that I had every day,” Swift said. “After the Eras tour, I had a meeting with my team, and we decided this might be a good time to approach the current owners of it. The owners of it was a private equity firm called Shamrock Capital. I knew them to be above board people.”

To make her pitch to Shamrock, she said she realized she needed a creative approach.

“It’s a huge decision for them to make, to sell that to anyone, including me. I decided that, rather than this be like a business conversation, I, I’m in the business of human emotion,” Swift explained. “I would so much rather lead heart first in something like this. Because for me, this is not, oh, I want to own this asset because of its returns, because of the dividends that I will receive over the years, this was because this is my handwritten diary entries from my whole life. These are the songs I wrote about every phase of my life. This is my photography, my music videos, my most of which I funded. You know, my artwork, everything that I’ve ever done is in this catalog.”

Instead of sending her lawyers or her management team, the singer decided to send her mom and brother. When they called her with the news that Shamrock had agreed to the sale, she could not hold back her tears of joy.

“It was a couple months after the Super Bowl. We’re in Kansas City, and I get a call from my mom, and she’s like, ‘You got your music,’” she said still visibly emotional about the memory. “And so sorry that this is, it’s literally been so long since this happened. It’s every time I talk about it, um, she’s like, You got, you got your music, and I just, like, very dramatically, hit the floor for real, like, honestly, just starting balling my eyes out.”

Swift, through tears, explained she quickly ran to Travis, who was playing video games at the time, screaming so much he thought something was wrong. When she told him, she recalled collapsing in his arms while he cried with tears of joy as well.

“This changed my life,” she said. “I can’t believe it still, every time I think about it, it’s like I have to tell the short version to everyone, because it is still like this. This will affect the rest of my life, as I think about this every day now. But instead of it being like an intrusive thought that hurts me, it’s I can’t believe this happened. Like, how lucky am I? How grateful am I? I’m so grateful.”

You can listen to Swift’s full “New Heights” episode in the video above.