Taylor Swift took viewers deeper into her own personal love story with the release of episodes three and four of her End of an Era Disney+ docuseries this week, peering back on how her mother Andrea helped kick off the relationship between Swift and Travis Kelce during Swift’s Eras Tour back in 2023.
“Do you want me to tell the story,” Andrea asks in episode four, titled “Thank You For The Lovely Bouquet,” as the two sit in a locker room together during Eras Tour prep. They said Swift had first come to know who Kelce was because her cousins took a selfie at his locker in the Chiefs locker room.
“I’m looking at the headlines perusing around what’s on the internet, and I see this guy came to your show and he brought a friendship bracelet and wants to meet you,” Andrea said, with the film showing a brief clip from Kelce famously courting Swift on the New Heights podcast in 2023. “I call up my resident expert on Kansas City Chiefs, my cousin Robin, and I go ‘tell me about this guy named Travis Kelce.’ She goes ‘Oh my god, he’s the nicest guy, and you know what? He really loves his mom? And I went ‘ding ding ding.’ No how in the world am I going to get her to meet him.”
Taylor remembered Andrea “calling me up with this tone of like ‘I know you’re not going to react well to this but there’s a guy,” with Andrea interjecting that “he’s really cute.”
“You said something to the effect of ‘you gotta start doing something different,” Taylor said.
As Andrea replied: “It was so earnest, I thought it was the sweetest thing in the world that he came to your show, he brought you something from your world, to me that really said a lot.”
Swift spoke about the personal struggles she faced on the road, recalling how she “went through two break ups in the first half of this tour, and that’s a lot of break ups,” referring to splits from exes Joe Alwyn and Matt Healy.
“The tour has never been the hard thing in my life, the tour has been the thing that has allowed me to find purpose outside of the shit that was going on in my life,” Swift said. “Men will let you down, the eras tour never will.”
Swift acknowledged that life on the road has typically made relationships challenging for her but added that “somehow there was this dynamic shift with now-fiancé Travis because it’s shocking how many similarities we have with our jobs and how we view them and how we view each other.”
Swift harkened back to Kelce’s cameo on the Eras Tour stage in London, calling Kelce “a real yes guy in terms of life itself.”
“The way that he just comes to life when the lights are the brightest, people talk about that,” Swift said, as Kelce himself has proven with one of the most decorated careers for a tight end in NFL history. “He can slow down time in the most stressful moments. He got up there and was the most charming, delightful performer you could ever be on the stage with.”
Aside from the Kelce details, episode four also goes behind the scenes for how Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift orchestrated Carpenter’s surprise appearance for Swift’s Eras Tour date in New Orleans, where the duo performed a medley of “Espresso,” “Is it Over Now?” and “Please Please Please.” There’s a sweet moment seeing Carpenter — a former Eras Tour opening act — gleam as she sees Swift singing “Espresso” with just the two of them in the room, while Carpenter was in the middle of her ascent to pop superstardom.
“It’s the dream scenario for how you’d want your career to go as an artist,” Swift said in the doc of Carpenter’s rise last year.
Outside of the more star-studded bits, this week’s episodes go deeper on Swift’s strenuous workout routine to prep for her marathon concerts, showing Swift throwing medicine balls, completing battle rope exercises and doing pull-ups. Viewers get a closer look at the dynamic between Swift and the tour family she’s cultivated with her choreographers, backing musicians and vocalists. The doc revealed that background singer Jeslyn Gorman had to take several months off after a breast cancer diagnosis, but she came back as soon as her treatment wrapped.
“The will to come back and do the hardest show ever, none of us could believe it,” Swift said, praising Gorman.
We also get a bigger look at how Swift and her stylist Joseph Cassell assembled her iconic wardrobe for the Eras Tour, in particular zooming in on the development of her alternate gold-colored Reputation era catsuit, how Cassell overcame fitting challenges, and the calamity from Swifties when the outfit was finally revealed on stage.
The release for the final two episodes of End of an Era have moved up, Swift and Disney revealed this week, as episodes five and six will now drop at midnight on Dec. 23 next week.