Yahoo News Taylor Swift shows off all her sports metaphors in seemingly Travis Kelce–inspired love track 'The Alchemy'
Beers, cheers, and trophies — oh my!
Taylor Swift once sang, "Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time." If her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, can best be understood as a postmortem for her past heartbreaks, one of its tracks seems to represent her most recent resurrection.
To recap: Reports surfaced in April 2023 that Swift and her longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn had broken up after more than six years together. Shortly after, the singer and the 1975 frontman Matty Healy were romantically linked for a little more than a month. Then, in September, Swift stepped out at one of NFL tight end Travis Kelce's Kansas City Chiefs games, seeming to confirm their courtship. The news promptly dominated the sports and pop culture zeitgeists, culminating with Swift cheering Kelce and his team on to their ultimate Super Bowl victory.
While the bulk of her latest album is, by Swift's own admission in the epilogue she has written in the album's insert, about old flames, we'd like to submit evidence that at least one song may be about her current one — and it ends the original TTPD tracks with a glimmer of hope.
In "The Alchemy," Swift is falling head over heels again, likening it to a comeback, which is the first of many sports metaphors in the track. She follows this up with the line "So when I touch down, call the amateurs and cut ‘em from the team" — with "touch down" seeming like a nod to the football term, and her references to amateurs and teams and starting lineups seeming even more obvious.
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Travis Kelce and Taylor SwiftIf some of the verses seem to contain allusions to other guys, Swift later declares, "These blokes warm the benches / We been on a winning streak," adding that her new romance is the one she's embracing, letting all of its happy chemicals wash over her "like white wine."
But it's in the song's final moments that the singer seems to offer the most overt references to her sweet Super Bowl champion, even likening herself to the ultimate prize (Vince Lombardi Trophy be damned): "Shirts off and your friends lift you up over their heads / Beer sticking to the floor / Cheers chanted 'cause they said there was no chance / Trying to be the greatest in the league / Where's the trophy? / He just comes running over to me."
After an album stacked with songs about heartache so bad that Swift compares it to "cardiac arrest" in her epilogue, "The Alchemy" seems to swing the pendulum back to a different kind of madness — the good kind. Maybe, just maybe, this love is worth rising from the dead again. Who are they to fight the alchemy?
The Tortured Poets Department is out now.
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