For The Life of a Showgirl release week, Taylor Swift’s booked and busy with a bazillion interviews to promote the glitzy new record. (As if anything she does needs to be promoted anymore. It’s just a formality, really.) Naturally, the pop icon stopped by The Tonight Show to chat with her old pal, Jimmy Fallon. But it wasn’t your typical quick and cute celeb interview on a late night show — no, we got a bunch of fun segments and like 45 minutes of Taylor content. Everyone say: “Thank you, Jimmy!”
During her appearance on the show, Taylor obviously spoke about the new album in great detail (they discussed it track by track), but she also opened up about why she turned down the Super Bowl halftime show, what she said in her speech at Selena Gomez’s wedding, and why Ed Sheeran found out about her engagement on Instagram like the rest of us. In case you missed it, here are the most interesting revelations from Taylor Swift’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon interview.
While there was a rumor Taylor turned down the Super Bowl because the NFL wouldn’t let her own her performance footage, that’s not actually why she declined. “Here’s the thing,” she said on The Tonight Show. “Jay Z has always been very good to me. Our teams are very close. They sometimes will call and say how does she feel about… and that’s not an official offer or a conference room conversation.” (Jay Z is in charge of producing the Super Bowl halftime show through his company, Roc Nation.) Taylor added, “We’re always able to tell him the truth, which is that I am in love with a guy who does that sport on that actual field.”
“That is violent chess,” Taylor emphasized. “That is gladiators without swords. That is dangerous. The whole season I am locked in on what that man is doing on the field.”
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She joked, “Can you imagine if 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.'” I mean… that would be great.
Taylor clarified that Travis would definitely support her doing the halftime show. “This is nothing to do with Travis, he would love for me to do it,” she said. “I’m just too locked in.”
Taylor did give a sweet speech at Selena Gomez’s wedding, but she did not joke about her bestie beating her to the altar. “I actually made a point not to mention anything about my engagement,” she told Jimmy.
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Apparently, she reminisced about her and Selena’s 2008 fashion during the speech. “I did do some light teasing about the way we used to dress in the year 2008 — the year that we met,” Taylor shared. “We met when we were teenagers in 2008. It was quite a year. It was the year of deep, deep V-necks. It was the year of aggressively colorful skinny jeans.”
She recalled, “Selena — her favorite outfit back then was a very long tank top, skinny jeans, but a tiny little vest. The smallest vest, and Chucks, and that was her uniform that year. Mine was I always looked like I was late for the cowboy-themed junior prom.” (I remember it all too well.) Taylor said she also talked about “how it’s been beautiful to get to be a part of [Selena’s] life.”
Ed really did find out about the engagement via Taylor’s Instagram post! But there’s a pretty good explanation for that. “He doesn’t have a phone!” Taylor pointed out. “He doesn’t have one that works.”
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She called the singer/songwriter “one of my absolute favorite people on the planet” and said he’s “like family.” After the engagement news broke, Taylor panicked when she realized they forgot to tell him.
Taylor explained how her provocative, Sabrina Carpenter-esque track, “Wood,” came to be. (And no, the infamous redwood tree tweet was not mentioned.) “I brought this into the studio and I was like, ‘I wanna sort of do a throwback kind of timeless sounding song,'” Taylor said. “I had this idea about, ‘I ain’t gotta knock on wood.’ And it would be all these superstitions.”
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She added, “And it really started out in a very innocent place. I dunno 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.” She giggled.
