1) Taylor on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on rumors about her being the Super Bowl halftime performer:

“No. No, no. Well, here’s the thing, like, Jay-Z has always been very good to me. Our teams are really close, like, they sometimes will call and say, ‘How does she feel about, you know?’ And that’s not like, an official offer or a conference room conversation. Like, our teams are really close. ‘How does she feel about it, in general?’ And we’re always able to like, tell him the truth, which is that like, I am in love with a guy who does that sport on that actual field. Like, that is violent chess. That is gladiators without swords. That is dangerous. I am, the whole season, I am locked in on what that man is doing on the field
. Can you imagine if like, he’s 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! I think we should do two verses of Shake It Off into Blank Space into Cruel Summer would be great!’ It’s just like, this is, and this is nothing to do with Travis, he would love for me to do it. I’m just too locked in, like, yeah.”

2) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon about the difference between The Tortured Poets Department and The Life Of A Showgirl:

“This was sort of a surprise and a secret that I had been carrying around for a year, and I was so excited. It’s like, when you’re like, ‘I’ve got a really great Christmas present for my brother,’ but you have it for a year. And so it’s really exciting that, you know, they have opened the present, and they are playing with the toy. It’s fantastic, like, this has just been like, I think the most well-matched era in terms of where my life was when I wrote it, and then where I am now, when it’s out in the world. I feel exactly the same way as I did when I wrote and recorded these songs. Sometimes you write like, The Tortured Poets Department, the name didn’t lie.

I wrote that song and I was just like, miserable. And then when I put it out, I was like, ‘I’m so happy now.’ So release week just meant like, putting my phone in a drawer, you know? This feels so special because like, with my albums, I love to kind of like, showcase sort of like, aspects of my personality that are in the extreme, right?

Like Tortured Poets Department, my last album, was really highlighting the facets of me that are like, a writer that’s like earnest and stoic and raw and srot of like, the sprawling part of it, or the part of me that wants to be like, ‘I’m just going to write everything and give you everything I wrote,’ right? Raw, and like, pain, and just excruciating detail. And then that was the character of the poet, and this, I wanted to be the character of the showgirl, which is like other aspects of a person’s personality where you’re like, funny, and feisty, and like, having a blast, and flirty, and sort of tongue-in-cheek, and a little scandalous, friendly.”

3) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon about her toast at Selena’s wedding and their friendship:

“It’s false [that I joked I beat Selena to the altar]! So I got to see her be the most elegant, gorgeous, not only bride but just, vision that I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful as her on her wedding day, and she deserves all of this happiness. Benny is, he is him. He is so funny. He’s the best. So, I did make a speech, but I actually made a point not to mention anything about my engagement. Nobody wants you to be like, ‘Hey, I know that this is your wedding day, but look at me!,’ you know? I was like, ‘Don’t mention. Like maybe turn it around.’

Do you know what I mean? I did do some light teasing about the way that we used to dress in 2008, the year that we met, because we met when we were teenagers in 2008. It was quite a year, let me tell you. It was the year of deep, deep v-necks. I just go into like, The Gilded Age, because I love The Gilded Age. Don’t even get me started, Carrie Coon’s character. ‘It was the year of aggressively. colorful skinny jeans. Everyone was walking around saying things were amazeballs.’

Mrs. Aster hated it. So basically, Selena used to like, her outfit back then was like, a very long tank top, skinny jeans, but like a tiny little vest. Like, the smallest vest. And Chucks. Like that was her uniform of that year. And mine was that I just always looked like I was late for the cowboy-themed junior prom. And so I talked a little about 2008, I talked about how happy I am for her, and how beautiful it’s been to get to be part of her life, but I did not make it about me!”

3) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon explaining why Ed Sheeran found out about her engagement on Instagram:

“That is true. I have a perfect explanation. He doesn’t have a phone! He doesn’t have a phone. He doesn’t have one that works, so he doesn’t have a phone. And this is like, one thing I love about him, it’s very eccentric, love it, but when I’m going through being like, ‘Hey, who should we call? Who should we FaceTime?’ I’m going through my texts, and being like, ‘Who have I texted with in the last like, month of my life?’

And he just wasn’t there, because you have to like, he’s very—you have to email him, and then you want to set up a FaceTime, and he has to find an iPad, they have to give it to him like he’s a child that you give the iPad to. This is one of my absolute favorite people on the planet, and then when the news came out, I was like, ‘Oh my god, we forgot to call Ed! Oh no!’ He’s like family. Like, I love him, but he doesn’t have a phone.”

4) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on what her engagement ring means to her:

“Oh, thanks. It’s crazy. That’s crazy. He did [put a lot of work into the ring]. He did, and he had it for a really long time before he gave it to me, too. So he had it like, he custom did this and designed it with this amazing jeweler who he made it with. I know [the sides are beautiful]. I know. I look at it constantly. Like, it’s not, it doesn’t feel in any way normal for me. I’m just sort of like, ‘Oh, man! Whoa!’ But like, it’s more than that. It’s just, he’s just my favorite person I have ever met, no offense to everyone else. But 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. You look at that, and you’re like, ‘I get to hang out with him forever,’ and this represents that.”

5) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on being proposed to after taping her episode of New Heights:

“Yes [we did get engaged right after the podcast], so basically, I think for Travis, the podcast was basically just sort of a distraction, sort of ruse, to keep me not looking out the windows of the house. Because every time he does the podcast, it’s not like he blacks out all the windows, the drapes, it was just fully blackout drapes on every single window of the whole house. And I was like, ‘You are so serious about this, and I really appreciate that,’ but then afterwards, I kind of realized like, he’s walking around sort of nervous about the podcast.

He’s like, ‘My heart is racing. I just really want, I know how much this means to you, I really want this to be what you hoped it would be,’ because we’d been talking about doing the podcast, and announcing the album. And he was just like, ‘My heart’s racing.’ I’ve never seen this dude nervous, ever. He’s a professionally not nervous person. And so he was like, ‘Do you want to go and just walk around the backyard and have a glass of wine?’ And I was like, ‘I’m always gonna want to do that.’ And then I realized exactly why all of the windows were curtained, and why he was nervous, and it was the best possible case scenario. That [photo] is what he was turning the backyard into, like a secret garden.”

6) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on the last TV shows she watched:

“There’s two I’m on right now. [The Gilded Age], yeah. I love it, but that’s not the last one. The Girlfriend is a good one, and The Paper is a good one.”

7) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on the last non-Showgirl song of her own she listened to:

“Okay, so I have this tradition when, the eve before I have a new album that comes out that starts a new musical era, I listen to the entirety of the last album that I made. So I listened to Tortured Poets Department to say goodbye to it, and I do it every time. It’s every night before a new album comes out!”

8. Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on the last song she listened to:

“Oh, Tate McRae has a great new song called Tit For Tat. You gotta listen to it. It’s in my head, full volume, over and over again, on repeat. It’s just so good.”

9) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on the Kitty Finlay reference in The Fate Of Ophelia music video:

“It says ‘Starring Kitty Finlay,’ and there’s a fictional character named Kitty in The Life Of A Showgirl, the song, that’s just this character who you meet, she’s up onstage, she’s doing—you realize, I want to do what she’s doing. She inspires you. And then when you meet her, she warns you against doing it, which I think is something that may have happened to anyone who has said they wanted to go into music, you know? People who are in it will tell you how hard it is, and how chaotic it can be, and just how cutthroat.

But if you love it enough, you’ll do it anyway, and you’ll take what comes with it. So that’s that name. But it’s also the name of my mom’s Great Dane, which is important to my mom, so it’s important to me. [My mom] is absolutely the best, she is absolutely the best. And then her mother, again, my mom, her mother is named Marjorie Finlay. That was my grandmother, so that’s where Finlay came from. All signs lead back to my mom. She’s the greatest. She is.”

10) Taylor on Wood:

“So I brought this into the studio, and I was like, ‘I want to do sort of like, I want to like, do a throwback kind of timeless sounding song, and I have this idea about like, ‘I ain’t gotta knock on wood.’ And it would be all these superstitions. And it really started out in a very innocent place, you know? It started out like—you know? I don’t know what happened, man. I got in there, we started vibing, and I don’t know. I don’t know how we got here, but I love the song so much.”

11) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on the title track and getting Sabrina Carpenter to feature:

“I’ve been writing this album around the themes of show business, and public life, because honestly, we all have a public life now. We all are mandating relationship with social media and social circles and gossip, and so I was like, I want to focus sort of on the playful, fun, funny, humorous sides of that. And so we’d been dealing with kind of themes like that, and sprinkling those throughout the record, but I had it in my notes, just ‘You don’t know the life of a showgirl.’

I just had it in my notes written down, and I was like, ‘I’ve just gotta figure out how this fits in,’ and all of a sudden this song comes together, and the first thought I had was, ‘Sabrina Carpenter,’ you know? She’s like, quintessential showgirl. She’s such a funny person. She is so tough in the right ways, and soft and vulnerable in the right ways to be an artist that is dealing with the kind of just absolute mayhem that gets kind of, that these artists get subjected to when you’re putting out art publicly.

And I was so happy that she wanted to sing that second verse, because I kind of wrote it for her, that she’s just this like, ‘She was a menace, the baby of the family in Lenox, her father whored around like all men did, her mother took pills and played tennis.’ I was like, ‘I just know she’s going to have fun singing this.’ It’s just her type of lyric. She loves to write like, a clever little jab at men.”

12) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on whether she has contemporaries and what it means to make art in the current moment:

“I mean that sounds sad. But it’s actually like, you just kind of find your people, even if it’s not about relating to people, like I can’t really relate to the pressure that Travis is under out there on the field. Like, I’ve never had 300-pound men running at me, trying to hurt me, you know what I mean?

And the same way that with Sabrina, I’ve never come up with a new artist in the moment that she’s coming up, where she’s had social media—like, I remember when someone told me about Instagram, and it was on my second or third record, so I’ll never be able to relate to their experience. We’ll never be able to have identical experiences. But as sort of entertainers, one of our main jobs, I think, is to be a mirror for people. You look into the art we make. You see yourself back.

The way you feel about our art has a lot to do with the life experience that you’re having at this point in time, and that’s why I’m so happy I have so many different albums. Like, people will come up to me and be like, ‘I didn’t get reputation. I didn’t understand what that was like. Now, five years later, it’s my favorite record.’ Or evermore, or something like that. And it is like, the fun of it, for us to create a mirror for people to look into, I definitely think that Sabrina and every other artist out there doing this can relate to that, so in that way, I do feel like we all can relate to each other.”

13) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Father Figure:

“That song was so much fun to write. So it’s like, protege, mentor, and the relationship between the two, right? And the power dynamics, and sort of the idea that the power could flip, and somebody could betray somebody. That’s so fun to write. And this is written from the perspective of like, the mentor to the protege, because I kept thinking about that scene in Succession where Logan looks at his kids, and says, ‘I love you. But you are not serious people.’ And I think about that scene constantly.

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 Logan Roy being like, ‘You bit the hand that fed you, and you do not have possess the vernacular to be doing this.’ But I also really have completely related to the protege perspective in so many of these situations, right? Like I relate to the younger one, like when I’m listening to this song, even though it’s from the perspective of the father figure character. That’s why I like this song so much. […] Oh yes, [the dick lyric], it’s entertainment. It’s my one job. You know? The spice level on this album is high.”

14) Taylor on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Elizabeth Taylor:

“I love Elizabeth Taylor. I love her so much. She is like, I think the ultimate sort of icon role model that I look to when I look at somebody who had immense pressure on them, who was extremely scrutinized, everything she ever did, she kept making more and more daring art.

It’s almost like the more polarizing people were about her, the more she just kept like, doing even more challenging roles, taking bigger risks, and she’s like out here, at the height of whatever scrutiny she may have been under, and like the height of her fame, she’s like winning Oscars, and not letting anything kind of stop her from doing it for the reasons she’d always done it. She was so funny.

She used humor as like, a device against sort of anybody who had, any of her detractors or whatever, like, I’ve done that with songs like Blank Space, when people are like, ‘Oh you’re a man-eating serial dater,’ and I’d just be like, ‘Oh, let me write a song from that perspective. That’s hilarious.’ So I think you have to be able to combat negativity with humor. That’s my favorite thing about her. I just wanted to make a song that felt like as luxurious and glamorous as she was in the verses, and the bridge. We had a harp, we pulled out all the stops for her. Everybody should be obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor.”

15) Taylor speaks on how she thinks part of the job of entertainers is to be mirrors:

“But as sort of entertainers, one of our main jobs, I think, is to be a mirror for people. You look into the art we make. You see yourself back. The way you feel about our art has a lot to do with the life experience that you’re having at this point in time, and that’s why I’m so happy I have so many different albums.
Like, people will come up to me and be like, ‘I didn’t get reputation. I didn’t understand what that was like. Now, five years later, it’s my favorite record.’ Or evermore, or something like that. And it is like, the fun of it, for us to create a mirror for people to look into…”