travis kelce

Sea otters love to play, play, play, play, play and they also have to eat, eat, eat, eat, eat — at least that’s what people say — so the Monterey Bay Aquarium is tapping Taylor Swift fans for help.

The Central Coast aquarium launched a fundraising campaign Thursday involving a re-release of one of its classic T-shirt designs to support its sea otter program and other marine conservation efforts after noticing a curious flood of $13 donations it could attribute only to Taylor Swift fans.

The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter is seen sporting a vintage 1993 Monterey Bay Aquarium shirt with sea otter art in “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” her movie celebrating the release of her latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” Swift’s fiancé, Travis Kelce, a tight end with the Kansas City Chiefs, is a known sea otter fan, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium had previously invited the couple for a special visit.

“Swifties, you truly walk the talk,” the aquarium said in a post on its website announcing the new campaign. “We tracked down the original artwork — first printed in the 1990s — and are bringing it back to say thank you, sustainably.”

The limited-time fundraiser, which offers the new eco-conscious reprints of the shirt in adult and kids sizes to those who donate $65.13, hit its initial goal in a mere seven hours, according to an update posted Thursday by the aquarium. When this story was published Friday, the total was approaching $2.2 million and the shirts were available on back order only.

“Intentional or not, by putting our sea otter conservation work in the spotlight, this has brought a new era of support and awareness to the Aquarium’s long history of ocean conservation,” the Monterey Bay Aquarium said on its website, which also features some fun Swift and sea otter crossover facts.

In addition to debuting the music video for “The Fate of Ophelia,” Swift’s “Release Party” movie included behind-the-scenes footage and commentary from the artist about her songs. The 89-minute movie made $34 million at the box office over its one weekend in theaters.

Taylor Swift is “shockingly” offended by the idea that “The Life of a Showgirl” could be — given her recent engagement to Travis Kelce — her final album.

“It is not the last album. That’s not why people get married,” the singer told BBC Radio 2 on Monday.

“They love to panic sometimes,” she said, talking about conspiracy theorists in the Swifty-verse, “but it’s like, I love the person I am with because he loves what I do and he loves how much I am fulfilled by making art and making music.”

Rumors started to make their rounds after the couple announced their engagement in August through a joint Instagram post. Fans speculated that after she said “I do,” she would have children and move on from music — or so BBC host Scott Mills had informed his guest.

Wait, mothers can’t have careers? Swift called that a “shockingly offensive thing to say.”

Weeks earlier, the Grammy-winning singer announced the impending arrival of her 12th album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” on her now-fiancé’s podcast hosted along with brother Jason Kelce. Since the release last week, the rumors grew louder and louder, with some fans predicting this album would be it for the pop artist.

To which Swift pushed back:

“That’s the coolest thing about Travis, he is so passionate about what he does that me being passionate about what I do, it connects us,” Swift said.

Their passions in life aren’t so different, according to the singer.

“We both, as a living, as a job, as a passion, perform for 3½ hours in NFL stadiums,” the showgirl said. “We both do 3½-hour shows to entertain people.”

When she’s touring, she gets a dressing room, Swift said, but when he’s playing in the same space, they call it a locker room.

“It’s a very similar thing and we’re both competitive in fun ways, not in ways that eat away at us,” she added.

Over the weekend, while Kelce prepared for the Kansas City Chiefs’ “Monday Night Football” game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, the future Mrs. Tight End released “Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl” in theaters. The experience earned $33 million over the weekend, topping the box office, according to Box Office Mojo.

The music video for the album’s opening track, “The Fate of Ophelia,” premiered along with the release-party movie. Swift wrote and directed it.

“[The music video] is very, like, big and glitzy and it’s so fun and it’s supposed to be like the day in the life of a showgirl,” she said.

Multitasking has become a norm for the “Cruel Summer” singer, who juggled her last tour with the recording of the album.

Swift said she flew to Sweden on multiple occasions during the Eras Tour to record the album. Her loyal inner circle did not leak any information.

“My friends don’t rat, they do not rat and you can tell by the amount of stories about me that are out there that are absolutely not true,” she said.

OK, Swifties, you can breathe now. You can stop looking for clues into whether this is it for Tay-tay’s music career. Shake it off until her next release.

Taylor Swift has a lot to be happy about — including a ring she says she could watch “like it’s a TV.”

The “Bejeweled” pop star hit “The Graham Norton Show” Friday to promote her new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” and the host swiftly congratulated her on the “new bit of finger jewelry.”

“He really crushed it when it came to surprising me,” Swift said of fiancé Travis Kelce’s marriage proposal. “He went all out. 10 out of 10.”

The “Norton Show” appearance marks the first time the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter has addressed this new chapter of her love story with the Kansas City Chiefs tight end on TV. In August, the high-profile couple announced they were engaged with a joint Instagram post that looked straight out of an enchanted garden.

According to Swift, the viral photos were not staged. While the couple were recording an episode of Kelce’s podcast, “New Heights,” the three-time Super Bowl champion was having his backyard transformed for the romantic occasion. (Kelce’s father, Ed, let it slip shortly after the announcement that the proposal had happened at Travis’ home in Lee’s Summit, Mo.) Among the added greenery were a few strategically placed hedges where Swift’s tour photographer could capture the proposal unnoticed.

“It’s really fun that we actually have the exact moment” when he proposed, Swift said.

Television is not the only place where Swift has been unable to stop gushing about her fiancé.

Fans have been meticulously dissecting the lyrics on all of the tracks on Swift’s latest album and there are plenty of nods to Kelce. The most explicit, according to Swifties and Swiftologists, is “Wood,” which is being described as her horniest and most openly sexual song to date.

Times pop music critic Mikael Wood describes the song as “a kind of kiddie-disco number that … exults in the erotic thrill of a guy brandishing ‘new heights of manhood,’” pointing out the reference to Kelce’s podcast. Among the other lyrics that are causing a frenzy among fans include references to a “Redwood tree,” how “his love was thе key that opened [her] thighs” and “a hard rock [being] on the way.”

Clearly, Swift is just as giddy about her upcoming nuptials as Kelce.

After the mess, the mop-up.

That’s one way to understand Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” on which music’s biggest star offers up a dozen precision-cut pop songs just 18 months removed from last year’s sprawling and emotionally unstable “The Tortured Poets Department.”

That earlier LP, which contained 16 tracks before Swift expanded it with 15 more, was perhaps the most divisive of the singer’s two-decade-long career; it racked up bonkers sales and streaming numbers, of course — at this point, she’s truly too big to fail — but its mixed reception among tastemakers and even some fans seemed to rattle Swift, who for all her alertness to the brutality of being a woman in the public eye has become accustomed to a certain level of idolatry.

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So here’s “Showgirl,” her 12th studio LP, for which she stepped away from her longtime creative partner Jack Antonoff to reteam with Max Martin and Shellback, the two hit-making Swedish producer-songwriters who helped her transition cleanly from country to pop in the mid-2010s with blockbuster albums like “Red” and “1989.” Swift has said she made the new album while roaming around Europe in the summer of 2024 on her record-obliterating Eras tour, which explains the title even as it begs all sorts of questions about her psychotic work ethic.

And let’s be clear: These three can craft a hook as neatly and as skillfully — as deviously, really — as anyone in the business. In contrast with the bleary “Tortured Poets,” which yielded only one pop-radio monster in the Hot 100-topping “Fortnight,” “Showgirl” is likely to spin off several, not least the album’s lead single, “The Fate of Ophelia,” which rides an irresistible new wave groove that evokes the veteran hookmeisters of Eurythmics. (Look ’em up, kids.)

As a piece of psychological portraiture, though — the framework, for better or for worse, by which Swift has trained us to interpret her music — this collection of expertly tailored bops falls well short of its predecessor; “Showgirl” feels like a retreat from the vivid bloodletting of “Tortured Poets,” which captured a woman whose one-of-one success had emboldened her to speak certain toxic truths.

Is that because she’s ended up in a healthy romantic relationship with Travis Kelce, the NFL star whom she’s engaged to marry? One hates to indulge hoary ideas about happiness being bad for songwriters. Yet there’s no denying that Swift’s lyrics about love here lack the kind of depth she’s mined in tunes thought to have been inspired by the dastardly likes of John Mayer and Matty Healy.

“Please, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot,” she sings, somehow, in the electro-trappy “Wish List,” which recounts all the hoping and dreaming she did before she finally met Mr. Right; “Wood,” a kind of kiddie-disco number that sounds like Martin was aiming it for the “Trolls” movie franchise, exults in the erotic thrill of a guy brandishing “new heights of manhood.” (In case you missed it, I’m sorry to say that’s a reference to Kelce’s podcast, on which Swift recently appeared and dropped a bar about her fiancé — “He may not have read ‘Hamlet,’ but I explained it to him” — that she really should have saved for “The Fate of Ophelia.”)

Elsewhere, she makes familiar complaints about the punishing experience of celebrity, as in “Elizabeth Taylor” — “Oftentimes, it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me” — and “Cancelled!,” which feels like a goth-Nirvana redo of “Look What You Made Me Do,” from 2017’s genuinely startling “Reputation.”

And then there’s the acidic “Actually Romantic,” which seems to be a response to Charli XCX’s “Sympathy Is a Knife,” in which Charli expressed her anxieties about being compared to Taylor in a zero-sum pop scene; Swift gets off some funny lines about chihuahuas and cocaine but totally forgoes the sense of empathy that made her such an icon to every pop songwriter who’s come up behind her.

What’s good on “Showgirl”? “Opalite” is a gorgeous soft-rock tune about overcoming old instincts — “I had a bad habit of missing lovers past / My brother used to call it ‘eating out of the trash’” — while “Ruin the Friendship” looks back at a shoulda-woulda high-school dalliance with the pin-prick precision that Swift has always mustered when writing about her adolescence. Both songs ride coolly laidback Fleetwood Mac-style grooves that feel new for Martin and Shellback, who throughout the album rely more than you’d expect on live instrumentation. (Hang with “Wish List,” if you can, for a killer bass line that shows up in the second verse.)

Swift sings more than once about legacy and inheritance on this album: “Father Figure,” which interpolates George Michael’s late-’80s classic of the same name, is narrated by a mentor who’s betrayed by his protégé; the Broadway-ish title track, which closes the album with a feature from Sabrina Carpenter, tracks the aspirations of a showbiz hopeful from fresh-faced naivete to all-knowing cynicism.

Maybe those songs are Swift’s way of telling us that she knows “The Life of a Showgirl” isn’t as sharp as it could’ve been. We’ll see if it’s as tidy as it needed to be.

TAYLOR SWIFT has admitted she no longer believed in ­marriage and had given up on love after splitting from long-term boyfriend Joe Alwyn.

The superstar has used her new album The Life Of A Showgirl — out today — to document going from depression to being wooed back to life by her fiancé, Travis Kelce.

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Though in a move that is sure to get the world talking, Taylor savages a ­mystery person, believed to be singer Charli XCX, for mocking her.

Taylor and Travis started dating in the summer of 2023 before he popped the question in August this year.

On lead single The Fate Of Ophelia, Taylor sings: “And if you’d never called for me. I might have drowned in the melancholy.

Rediscovered love of life

“I swore my loyalty to me, myself and I, right before you lit my sky up.”

She adds: “You dug me out of my grave and saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia.

“And if you’d not come for me, I might have lingered in purgatory.

“No longer drowning and deceived, all because you came for me.”

The song is based on Shakespeare’s character Ophelia in Hamlet.

After being toyed with by rich and powerful men, Ophelia goes insane and kills herself by drowning.

The track acts as a bridge between the doom of Taylor’s 11th album The Tortured Poets Department and her new, rediscovered love of life, all thanks to her Kansas City Chiefs man.

On Eldest Daughter, Taylor pines for true love, admitting she feels played and betrayed by men her whole life.

She says: “I’ve been dying just from trying to seem cool. But I’m not a bad bitch.

“The last time I laughed this hard was on the trampoline in somebody’s backyard. I must have been eight or nine.

“The night I fell off and broke my arm. Pretty soon I learned cautious discretion. When your first crush crushes something kind. When I said I don’t believe in marriage, that was a lie.”

Vowing she still secretly pines for true love despite being hardened to disappointment, Taylor sings: “And I’m never gonna let you down. I’m never gonna leave you out. So many traitors. Smooth operators.

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“But I’m never gonna break that vow. I’m never gonna leave you now.”

Despite only being out today, thanks to pre-orders The Life Of A Showgirl is already the fastest selling album of the year.

Written during Taylor’s record-breaking Eras Tour last summer, the record peels back what life was like for the star away from the stage.

On song Elizabeth Taylor, she sings about dating Travis: “Sometimes it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me.

“All the right guys promised they’d stay, under bright lights they withered away. But you bloom. Tell me for real. Do you think it’s forever?”

Despite the glitz and glamour, Taylor says she had “everything and nothing all at once” — pining for true love over material goods.

She sings: “Hey, what could you possibly get for the girl who has everything and nothing all at once?

“Babe, I would trade the Cartier for someone to trust.”

On Opalite, Taylor sings about “dancing through the lightning strikes”, a reference to her splitting with British actor Joe just weeks before embarking on the biggest tour of her career.

Storytelling best

Continuing with the theme of yearning for the simple things in life, Taylor uses Wi$h Li$t to double down on wanting love over material goods.

She pines: “I made wishes on all of the stars. Please, God bring me a best friend who I think is hot, I thought I had it right once, twice but I did not.”

She adds: “I just want you. Have a ­couple kids.”

For the title track, Taylor reverts to her storytelling best alongside fellow superstar Sabrina Carpenter.

The Life Of A Showgirl tells the brutal reality of life on the road chasing fame and fortune.

Taylor sings: “The more you play the more that you pay. You’re softer than a kitten so. You don’t know the life of a showgirl, babe

She continues: “I’m married to the hustle. And now I know the life of a showgirl, babe. And I’ll never know another. Pain hidden by the lipstick and lace.”

As a final nod to her record-breaking 24 months, the song —  and album —  fades out with live audio thanking fans as she takes her final bow on her Eras Tour.

CHARLI XCX

‘It’s sweet all the time you’ve spent on me‘

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THE most brutal track on the album is called Actually Romantic.

It appears to be a full take-down of Brit singer Charli XCX, who is friends with Taylor’s love rat ex Matty Healy.

Charli’s husband George Daniel is part of Matty’s band The 1975.

Taylor sings: “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave.

“High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me.

“Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face. Some ­people might be offended. But it’s actually sweet, all the time you’ve spent on me.”

Charli has long been accused of glamorising drug use – even ­releasing a vinyl of her latest record Brat filled with white powder. Rather than being a flash-in-the-pan spat, the duo have a long ­history.

Charli supported Taylor on her 2018 Reputation Stadium Tour. But the Brit hated the experience.

She told Pitchfork mag in 2019: “I’m really grateful that Taylor asked me on that tour. But, as an artist, it kind of felt like I was getting up on stage and waving to five-year-olds.”

From then on things seemed to sour further – and Charli’s Brat album track Sympathy Is A Knife is believed to be about Taylor.

Charli sings: “This one girl taps my insecurities. Don’t know if it’s real or if I’m spiraling. Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried.

“I’m opposite, I’m on the other side. I feel all these ­feelings I can’t control.”

SCOTT BORCHETTA

‘They don’t make loyalty like they used to’

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DESPITE plenty of floor fillers, Taylor’s new album is not all sweetness and light. As well as having a dig at Charli XCX, on Father Figure Taylor appears to round on Scott Borchetta.

He is the CEO of her first label Big Machine Records, who sold the rights to her first six albums in 2019.

The track features lines of George Michael’s 1987 single of the same name, as she seemingly talks about how Borchetta, right, boasted about being able to make her a star before stabbing her in the back.

“I’ll be your father figure, I drink that brown liquor. I can make a deal with the devil because my d’s bigger. This love is pure profit, just step into my office.”

She later adds: “They don’t make loyalty like they used to.”

Her reference to brown liquor is thought to be a nod to how Borchetta celebrated selling her masters to Scooter Braun over a glass of whisky.

In an open letter to fans about the sale, Taylor wrote: “These are two very rich, very powerful men.

“Then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photoshoot, raising a glass of scotch to themselves.

“Because they pulled one over on me and got this done so sneakily that I didn’t even see it coming.”

Earlier this year, Taylor finally bought back her masters.

Hinting at her victory, she ends the track singing: “We drank that brown liquor. You made a deal with this devil. Turns out my d’s bigger. You want a fight, you found it.”

BIZARRE VERDICT

★★★★☆

THE Tortured Poets Department – for me the best Taylor album until now – was always going to be a hard act to follow.

But a drastic change of direction here has served the star well.

Lyrically, she continues at her best – with enough metaphors and coded literary references to keep fans speculating for ages.

Pop records are the hardest to perfect when it comes to both lyrics and melodies, but with producers Max Martin and Shellback by her side, Taylor has once again made magic.

With The Life Of A Showgirl, she proves yet again she’s the best in the business. Are there a couple of skips? Yes. But there’s also some of her best ever work.

Lead single The Fate Of Ophelia is an earworm of a track that’s perfect for both radio and dancefloors. It’s also possibly the most infectious Taylor lead single of all time.

Elizabeth Taylor, Ophalite and Cancelled! are also standouts.

Taylor’s reign atop the music industry is far from over.

Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid told reporters not to “make too much” of the sideline spat between him and star tight end Travis Kelce during the second quarter of the team’s 22-9 win over the New York Giants on “Sunday Night Football.”

NBC’s cameras caught the two men yelling at each other, with Reid at one point appearing to intentionally give Kelce’s shoulder a hard bump with his own shoulder. The Chiefs were up 6-0 at the time, but the offense had just failed to capitalize on a Giants turnover.

Going into halftime, as the confrontation with Kelce played on viewers’ screens, NBC’s Melissa Stark asked Reid what his message was to the team after seeing “a lot of frustration and emotion from your key players, star players on the sideline.”

“That’s OK, we need some juice,” said Reid, whose team had entered the game 0-2. “So that’s good.”

During his postgame news conference, Reid was asked what he had been trying to get across to Kelce during the exchange.

“I love Travis’ passion, and so I’m OK with that. We didn’t have enough of it,” Reid said. “That second quarter wasn’t where we needed to be. So within reason, you know, he knows — he knows when to back off the pedal, and knows when to push it too. So that’s part I love about him, the guy’s all in. Just sometimes I have to be the policeman.”

Reid added: “Listen, he’s an emotional guy. He’s Irish.”

Asked if the exchange was him telling Kelce to back off a bit, Reid answered: “Don’t make too much of it. He’s a passionate guy, and I love that part. So I’ve been through a lot of things with him, so that’s all part of it. I love that he loves to play the game. That’s what I love. And it’s an emotional game. So I’ll take it.”

Kelce wasn’t made available to speak to reporters after the game.

It’s not the first time the two men made contact during a sideline dispute. Early in the second quarter of Super Bowl LVIII against the San Francisco 49ers on Feb. 12, 2024, Kelce was seen yelling in his coach’s face, grabbing his arm and bumping into him, which appeared to cause Reid to stumble a bit.

After the Chiefs’ 25-22 overtime win in that game, Reid brushed off the incident, telling CBS that Kelce had hugged him and apologized after the incident.

“There’s nobody that I get better than I get him,” said Reid, who was 65 at the time. “He’s a competitive kid and he loves to play.”

Days later, on the “New Heights” podcast, Kelce expressed regret.

“It’s definitely unacceptable,” he said, “and I immediately wished I could take it back.”

On the same podcast, Kelce said: “Unfortunately, sometimes my passion comes out where it looks like it’s negativity, but I’m grateful that [Reid] knows that it’s all because I wanna win this thing with him more than anything.”

The Chiefs hadn’t started 0-2 since 2014, which was Kelce’s first year as a starter and Reid’s second as the team’s coach. The team has since played in five Super Bowls and won three.

This season is off to a slow start also for Kelce, a 10-time Pro Bowl selection. He has 10 catches in 17 targets for 134 yards and one touchdown. During the Chiefs’ 20-17 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 2, a pass from quarterback Patrick Mahomes bounced out of Kelce’s arms at the goal line and resulted in a game-changing interception by the Eagles’ Patrick Mukuba.

Also during the Philadelphia game, Kelce appeared to point to his crotch as part of a crude gesture aimed toward the opposing sideline after making a 23-yard reception. He was later fined $14,491 by the NFL for unsportsmanlike conduct.