Taylor Swift is the 2023 TIME Person of the Year...Were You Ready for It?

Taylor Swift has been named Person of the Year by TIME magazine. Swift has taken 2023 by storm with a full-scale stadium tour, tons of new music - and re-recorded favorites - as well as record-breaking sales numbers. Not to mention her philanthropic ventures and encouraging millions of young people to vote.

TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs writes, “The person chosen has typically been a ruler over traditional domains of power…very often a politician or a titan of industry…And yet the person whose singular influence was revealed throughout 2023 has held none of these roles—or anything remotely similar…Taylor Swift found a way to transcend borders and be a source of light…Swift is the rare person who is both the writer and hero of her own story.”

Jacobs continues, “...much of what Swift accomplished in 2023 exists beyond measurement. She mapped her journey and shared the results with the world: She committed to validating the dreams, feelings, and experiences of people, especially women, who felt overlooked and regularly underestimated…For building a world of her own that made a place for so many, for spinning her story into a global legend, for bringing joy to a society desperately in need of it, Taylor Swift is TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year.”

Swift is the first figure from the arts to be named Person of the Year for her success as an entertainer. She is the fourth solo Person of the Year to be born in the last century.

In the cover story, which features an exclusive interview with Swift— her first in-depth conversation in nearly four years—TIME’s Sam Lansky writes, “She’s the last monoculture left in our stratified world. It’s hard to see history when you’re in the middle of it, harder still to distinguish Swift’s impact on the culture from her celebrity, which emits so much light it can be blinding. But something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent. She deploys the most efficient medium of the day—the pop song—to tell her story. Yet over time, she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique—a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story.”

Lansky continues: “Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator. This was the year she perfected her craft—not just with her music, but in her position as the master storyteller of the modern era. The world, in turn, watched, clicked, cried, danced, sang along, swooned, caravanned to stadiums and movie theaters, let her work soundtrack their lives.”

HIGHLIGHTS FROM TIME’S EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH TAYLOR SWIFT:

Life on The Eras Tour:

On training for The Eras Tour: “Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud…Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs…Then I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones…I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought.”

On providing fans with a high-value experience: “They had to work really hard to get the tickets…I wanted to play a show that was longer than they ever thought it would be, because that makes me feel good leaving the stadium.”

On how after a run of shows, she takes a day to rest and recover: “I do not leave my bed except to get food and take it back to my bed and eat it there…It’s a dream scenario. I can barely speak because I’ve been singing for three shows straight. Every time I take a step my feet go crunch, crunch, crunch from dancing in heels.”

On how maintaining her strength through workouts is key: “I know I’m going on that stage whether I’m sick, injured, heartbroken, uncomfortable, or stressed…That’s part of my identity as a human being now. If someone buys a ticket to my show, I’m going to play it unless we have some sort of force majeure.”

On how getting to a place of harmony with her past and the success of the tour: “It’s not lost on me that the two great catalysts for this happening were two horrendous things that happened to me…The first was getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity…The second was having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me.”

On Challenges Throughout her Career:

On shape-shifting throughout her career: “I realized every record label was actively working to try to replace me…I thought instead, I’d replace myself first with a new me. It’s harder to hit a moving target.”

On how she felt the claims made by Kim Kardashian and Kanye West about his song “Famous” caused a career death: “Make no mistake—my career was taken away from me…You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar…That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”

On her $300 million catalog being sold to Ithaca Holdings, which is owned by music manager Scooter Braun: “With the Scooter thing, my masters were being sold to someone who actively wanted them for nefarious reasons, in my opinion…I was so knocked on my ass by the sale of my music, and to whom it was sold…I was like, ‘Oh, they got me beat now. This is it. I don’t know what to do.’”

On how fame is a seesaw: “Nothing is permanent…So I’m very careful to be grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level, because I’ve had it taken away from me before. There is one thing I've learned: My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art.”

On dealing with challenges: “But I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote-unquote defeat your enemies…Trash takes itself out every single time.”

On Travis Kelce:

On how her relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce played out publicly: “This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell…We started hanging out right after that. So we actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other. By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple. I think some people think that they saw our first date at that game? We would never be psychotic enough to hard launch a first date.”

On how she and Kelce show up for each other: “When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m going to see him do what he loves, we’re showing up for each other, other people are there and we don’t care…The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone. And we’re just proud of each other.”

On the attention put on her when she attends Kelce’s football games and her new interest in the sport: “I don’t know how they know what suite I’m in…There’s a camera, like, a half-mile away, and you don’t know where it is, and you have no idea when the-camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don’t know if I’m being shown 17 times or once…I’m just there to support Travis…I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads…Football is awesome, it turns out…I’ve been missing out my whole life.”

On Success in 2023:

On this moment in her career: “It feels like the breakthrough moment of my career, happening at 33…And for the first time in my life, I was mentally tough enough to take what comes with that….This is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been.”

On how the success of the Eras Tour, Barbie, and Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour feels like an inflection point: “If we have to speak stereotypically about the feminine and the masculine…women have been fed the message that what we naturally gravitate toward…Girlhood, feelings, love, breakups, analyzing those feelings, talking about them nonstop, glitter, sequins! We’ve been taught that those things are more frivolous than the things that stereotypically gendered men gravitate toward, right?…And what has existed since the dawn of time? A patriarchal society. What fuels a patriarchal society? Money, flow of revenue, the economy. So actually, if we’re going to look at this in the most cynical way possible, feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made. It’s extremely heartening.”

On life in the public eye: “Over the years, I’ve learned I don’t have the time or bandwidth to get pressed about things that don’t matter. Yes, if I go out to dinner, there’s going to be a whole chaotic situation outside the restaurant. But I still want to go to dinner with my friends…Life is short. Have adventures. Me locking myself away in my house for a lot of years—I’ll never get that time back. I’m more trusting now than I was six years ago.”