Taylor Swift's documentary series on Disney+ explores her Eras Tour and relationship with Travis Kelce. Photo / GC Images
Taylor Swift knows that her fans want to learn more about the Eras Tour.
She also knows they want to learn more about her relationship with Travis Kelce.
So in the third and fourth instalments of her new documentary series The End of an Era, released Friday on Disney+, she tackled the two topics. The third episode delves into the machinations behind a gargantuan, record-breaking world tour – the elaborate costuming, choreography and Swift’s gruelling personal training sessions. (“I’ve never worked out this much in my life, it’s horrible.”) Later, we see her rehearsing for a surprise duet with Sabrina Carpenter, and learn some personal stories of her band, backup vocalists and dancers.
Then, a portentous closing moment, in which she describes her tireless efforts to control as much of her life as possible.
“But sometimes, there’s something that happens that’s amazing, that’s not something you can plan for and not something that you can manufacture,” she says in a voiceover. “There’s still gotta be some, like, magical, beautiful mystery to life.”
The fourth episode kicks off with Swift in the studio recording her 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department, a deeply melancholy reflection on recent romantic disappointments spanning 31 songs – a “purge”, she says, of “everything bad that I had felt for two years”. Fans already know she split with longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn and short-lived fling Matty Healy during the first year of the tour. She says she relied on adrenaline to keep her going: “Men will let you down, the Eras Tour never will.”
Yet the scale of the tour and her chart successes could make her feel like she was a conglomerate whom no one perceived as a real human being – particularly the men she dated. “Nothing works,” she says. “There’s no one for me in the world.”
Tonal shift as the camera cuts to Swift sitting backstage in a bathrobe with her family and publicist in a stadium dressing room. It’s also a football locker room, which inspires her mother, Andrea, to share that the first time Swift ever heard of her now-fiance Travis Kelce was when her cousins took a photo in front of the NFL superstar’s locker at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City.
“Do you want me to tell the story?” Andrea asks.
“If you want to tell the story, then you should tell the story,” Swift says, grinning. “She wants to tell the story – Mom, tell the story.”
This, too, requires a backtrack over well-established Swift lore: how Kelce in July 2023 confessed on his podcast that he had tried but failed to deliver a friendship bracelet with his phone number to Swift when she played at Arrowhead.
Andrea says she learned about this when scrolling her phone and saw headlines about the podcast excerpt. Intrigued, Andrea called a cousin who follows the Kansas City Chiefs. The cousin raved about Kelce and added the magic words: “He really loves his mom.”
So Andrea called Taylor to urge her to try to give this American football star a chance.
Her daughter remained sceptical. She had never been drawn to athletes, “because I’m not one, and I’ve always just been, like, ‘Well, what would we talk about?’” Swift says.
She recalls her mother saying, “You gotta start doing something different”. Until Kelce, Swift had largely dated actors (such as Alwyn, her boyfriend of six years) and fellow musicians (Healy is the lead singer of the 1975).
This fills in what had been a puzzling gap for Swift scholars: the couple had previously acknowledged that people in their lives had been “playing Cupid” for them but never divulged who they were.
On their first date, Swift recalls, Kelce patiently explained the game of football, which he compared to “high-speed, angry chess”. Something clicked for her. “Then I just sort of became obsessed with him and therefore became obsessed with learning about football,” Swift says. “Greatest surprise of my life.”
We then get a peek at Kelce rehearsing for his onstage cameo at Wembley Stadium in London in June 2024, where he appeared in a tuxedo and top hat during a lead-up to I Can Do It With a Broken Heart. Swift says she didn’t want him to feel pressured into it, but “Travis … he’s a real yes-guy, like in terms of life itself. He’s just up for anything”.
We see him again, watching the concerts from the side, singing along, waiting for her under the stage so she sees him as soon as she exits and greets her with a kiss.
Swift says that in the past, she struggled with balancing relationships while she was on tour, because no matter how hard she tried, she was never able to nurture both. But Kelce just gets it.
“Somehow, there’s been this dynamic shift with Travis, because it’s shocking how many similarities we have towards our jobs and how we view them, and how we view each other,” she says, noting they have both been chasing these dreams since they were little kids, and that Kelce is comfortable being in the spotlight.
“I’ve realised that with this person in my life that was just the right fit for me, you can have the two passions co-exist, and they actually fuel each other.”
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