Taylor Swift explains why she is not performing at the Super Bowl: “I’m too locked in”

Taylor Swift’s been keeping herself busy promoting her new album The Life Of A Showgirl which hit stores on Friday. Not that she needs to plug it much - the new collection of songs became Spotify’s most-streamed album in one single day in 2025. The opening track, “The Fate of Ophelia” clocked 30,987,370 plays making it the most streamed song in one day in history, with another four songs (“Elizabeth Taylor”, “Opalite”, “Father Figure” and “Eldest Daughter”) making the top six positions in the ranking, all but one of them with 20 million in 24 hours.

Taylor was one of Graham Norton’s guests on his BBC chat show on Friday night, then then sat down to chat to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show which aired on Monday.

Taylor’s secret is finally out

She described the excitement of finally seeing her new album see the light of day as, “a surprise and a secret that I had been carrying around for a year - it’s like, when you’ve got a really great Christmas present for my brother, but you have it for a year! So it’s really exciting that they’ve opened the present and they’re playing with the toys!”

While Taylor’s new album has been a massive success within days of its release, her fiancé Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs have yet to get into their stride with five weeks of the 2025 NFL regular season gone. The Chiefs are third in the AFC West, eight in the conference standings with a 2-3 record so far and work to do if they are to make it to the Super Bowl for the fourth year running.

Taylor Swift Super Bowl LX rumors

Even before Kansas City reached Super Bowl LIX last season, there was speculation that Taylor Swift might be one of the halftime show acts (in the end it was Kendrick Lamar who headlined).

Rumors were swirling once again this year, before it was announced that Bad Bunny will be taking to the stage at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.

Fallon asked Taylor about whether she turned down the chance to appear at the Super Bowl “ because of performance footage”, although that particular segment of the interview ended up being cut from the original broadcast.

She replied that wasn’t the case at all, but she had her own highly personal reasons for not wanting to do it.

“Here’s the thing, Jay-Z has always been very good to me. Our teams are really close,“ she began. ”They sometimes will call and say, ‘How does she feel about…? And that’s not like an official offer or like a conference-room conversation, our teams are really close, ‘How does she feel about it in general?’ And we’re always able to tell him the truth which is like, I am in love with a guy who does that sport on that actual field...

“That is violent chess, that is 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 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 Up,” into “Blank Space,” into “Cruel Summer,” would be great!’ And this has nothing to do with Travis—he would love for me to do it. But I’m just too locked in.”

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