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NFL fans seem to have mixed feelings about all the coverage Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce‘s relationship is getting across various sports broadcasts, but Thursday Night Football announcer Al Michaels is all for it.
“We love it, man,” Michaels told Jimmy Kimmel on Monday night, during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Swift attended last week’s Thursday night game between Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs and the Denver Broncos, once again making headlines for sharing a suite with Travis’ mother, Donna Kelce, and hugging Brittany Mahomes, wife of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
“We had to be judicious,” Michaels told Kimmel about figuring out how best to address Swift’s presence on the Prime Video broadcast. “We had the game last Thursday night in Kansas City. We knew she’d be there. So how much do you show her? She’d been on twice, and football fans were going, ‘Enough.’ But we were praying she’d come into the booth and sing for us,” he said with a laugh.
Kimmel played a clip of Michaels fumbling his words while trying to describe Swift on the broadcast, as he settled on calling her Kelce’s “good buddy and girlfriend.”
“So is she his good buddy or his girlfriend, Al?” Kimmel said, ribbing the announcer. “You can’t be both!”
“You know, you’re doing a game like that, I know the Internet’s gonna blow up,” Michaels said. “Page Six is waiting for whatever I say. You know what I really wanted to say? ‘Fiancee.’ I didn’t because I figured Travis would beat me up at the end of the game. … Or [Swift] would have beat me up.”
In the end, Michaels and company wanted to make sure football came first in the broadcast. “It’s hard because people tune in to watch a football game,” he said. “I’m not doing Access Hollywood.”
Following Thursday’s game, Swift and Kelce confirmed their long-rumored relationship by attending the Saturday Night Live afterparty over the weekend hand-in-hand. (Find a full timeline of their relationship so far here.)
Watch Michaels’ Kimmel appearance below:
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When Maddie Zahm meets fans of hers in real life, a question immediately pops into her mind. “I’m always wondering, ‘Okay, so what’s your trauma?’” she tells Billboard over a Zoom call, sporting a cozy autumnal sweater. “Usually they will straight up tell me, because I have absolutely touched on like four different traumatic topics with my music.”
The singer’s face lights up as she begins laughing at her songwriting habits. To others, that level of candor and directness from a stranger on the street might sound scary; for 24-year-old Zahm, it’s a reciprocation of what she started with her music career. Thanks to radically forthright songs like “Fat Funny Friend” and “You Might Not Like Her” going viral on TikTok, the singer-songwriter grew accustomed to sharing her most internal thoughts with the people following her.
On her latest project, Zahm is going all-in on diaristic songwriting. Now That I’ve Been Honest, the singer-songwriter’s debut album (out Friday, Oct. 20 via AWAL), provides listeners with some of Zahm’s most intimate lyrics yet, looking back at her own experiences with trauma, coming out, and learning how to live her life as a fully functioning adult.
As she describes it, Zahm says she knew that she’d already let fans in on her thought process, so it only made sense that her full-length project would double down on the premise. “There’s this level of familiarity between [my fans and I] because I was really brutally honest with the EP [You Might Not Like Her]. So it didn’t make sense for me to all of a sudden not be honest,” she says. “Why would I stray from what I’ve been doing right thus far?”
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Getting to this point in her career was never a given for Zahm. The singer-songwriter took an early interest in music when she became a worship leader in her church at age 13. When leading services, she remembers feeling a sense of “calling,” but later found herself asking questions about what exactly was calling to her. “Is that the Holy Spirit, or is that just a good synth?” she recalls with a wry smile. “I have since figured it out.”
As her interest and belief in her church waned, her fascination with music only grew. At 19, Zahm decided to audition for season 16 of the just-rebooted American Idol. “It was mostly because I wanted to skip class, and I stand by that,” she quips. Wielding an acoustic guitar and a cherubic smile, the singer wowed Katy Perry, Lionel Richie and Luke Bryan with her soulful rendition of Dua Lipa’s “New Rules,” immediately earning three “yes” votes and advancing to Hollywood Week.
“I don’t know how the f–k I made it,” she says, looking back on her brief Idol stint. During Hollywood Week, she found herself forgetting the lyrics to the songs she was tasked with performing, “which is hilarious now that I’m such a lyric driven musician.” Eventually, Zahm was eliminated before the Top 24 of the show were announced.
Going back home in Boise, Idaho, Zahm decided to take a different approach to her career. Throughout the early days of the pandemic, she wrote, recorded and self-released a series of songs, which she later compiled into an LP called People Pleaser. Bearing very little resemblance to the delicate, earnest lyricism of her contemporary music, People Pleaser saw the songwriter trying her hand at simpler, country-inspired songs with one goal in mind: Get a publishing deal and become a songwriter.
“My intro to writing songs was listening to a bunch of breakup songs — I love a joke and I love leaning all the way into a bit, and with breakup songs, I realized that it’s literally just about being witty to a tune,” Zahm explains. “It felt like most like country songs were basically just ‘f–k you’ songs with a good storytelling aspect, so I decided to make that my genre.”
Her gambit worked — within a few months, Zahm was signed to a publisher and immediately began turning in her country tracks to see who would end up recording them. That’s when, as she puts it, she got some life-changing advice. “My rep on the publishing side basically told me, ‘This isn’t you,’” she recalls. “I said, ‘Ouch.’ But she was right — I had so much more to write. So then I started writing pop music and way oversharing.”
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One of the earliest songs Zahm wrote in her new phase of pop authorship was “Fat Funny Friend,” a devastating ballad about societal mistreatment of plus-size people and the toll that mistreatment can take on a person’s mind. Zahm’s voice aches with resonant pain as she sings heartbreaking words like, “They can’t relate/ To how I’ve drawn out in Sharpie where I’d take the scissors/ If that’s what it took for me to look in the mirror.”
But Zahm nearly didn’t release her career-defining song. When she originally started writing the track in 2021, she was in the middle of a weight-loss journey — which is what stirred up her feelings on the subject in the first place — and experienced conflicting emotions about the optics of releasing a song about being fat while actively losing weight.
“I was very aware that there wasn’t a song that blatantly talked about an experience of being fat,” she explains. “I know that when I was at my heaviest weight, if I heard a song like ‘Fat Funny Friend,’ looked it up, and saw this person singing it that had a smaller body, that really would have rubbed me the wrong way. So that was part of the reason I told everyone it was never going to be released.”
Things changed, though, when a man offered to help Zahm with some car trouble — when she arrived back home, she couldn’t stop thinking about the exchange. “I knew that before weight loss, it wouldn’t have been the same conversation. He would have acted totally different, and I was really upset about it.”
She published a clip of the song on her TikTok account in December of 2021, where she had amassed a small-but-mighty following over the last year of writing and releasing her own music. At first, there wasn’t anything too special about the response to the song. But within a few weeks, Zahm received a call from her publisher, telling her to look at the number of times her sound had been used on the app.
“There were thousands of people telling their story, and I started getting anxious,” she says. “I posted a video explaining why I still resonate with the song, even when I’m losing weight. And I woke up to about 30 million views. I remember not sleeping that night and calling my publisher back, saying, ‘What is happening?’”
In a matter of weeks, Zahm had amassed hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of streams on the song, all after she was certain she would have to abandon her solo career in favor of working as a songwriter. Instead, she saw that blistering honesty was her strength as an artist — which meant that she could tell her fans anything.
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“I don’t think I would be out of the closet if it wasn’t for ‘Fat Funny Friend,’” Zahm offers matter-of-factly. “That song encouraged a sense of vulnerability in me, and I saw what healing that gave to people. I would have been f–king selfish to have kept something like ‘You Might Not Like Her’ to myself. So, I came out for that song.”
Written as a letter to her younger, religious self, “You Might Not Like Her” tracks Zahm’s journey of deconstruction with her faith alongside her coming out journey as a queer woman. Throughout the song, the singer warns herself that “someday, you’ll kiss a girl and you’ll panic,” and that “you’ll hate that you’ll label yourself just to take it back/ Convinced you’re not bi ’cause you’re way too into guys,” before concluding that “for a while you might not like her, but I do.” The song, much like “Fat Funny Friend,” immediately found its audience on TikTok, with fans sharing their own coming out and deconstruction experiences along to the tune — exactly as Zahm had hoped.
With a brand rooted in writing intimate songs about her innermost thoughts, the singer-songwriter has found herself beginning to question what she reveals to her fans through her songs, and what she keeps for herself. “I’m writing the songs to heal, I’m not writing them to be relatable. So I’m still learning that line of what I’m comfortable writing about,” she says. “This album has actually kind of posed a conversation with myself, where I’m starting to figure out how much I’m willing to let people in.”
The other conversation Zahm found herself having throughout the making of Now That I’ve Been Honest was about her sound. Up until now, much of Zahm’s music has been rooted in soulful pop, reminiscent of the worship songs that she grew up listening to. But now, as an openly queer ex-Christian, Zahm wanted to find out what she sounded like outside of her church. “It was a lot of trial and error,” she says, rubbing the back of her head. “It was a lot of sending mixes to producers, them saying ‘This is f–king bad,’ and me saying, ‘So true, bestie, gonna try again.’”
That experimentation is evident on the album. Fans of Zahm’s established sound will have plenty to revel in with tracks like “Where Do All the Good Kids Go?” and the heartbreaking ballad “Dani.” But for those seeking something new, the singer-songwriter explores plenty of new sonic realms. On “Bedroom,” Zahm plugs in her guitars and turns up the angst, raging against an ex whose memory tainted her home. “Eightball Girl,” meanwhile, brings in bombastic pop sounds to follow Zahm’s all-encompassing crush on the titular character.
But there is likely no song on Now That I’ve Been Honest that feels more transformative for Zahm than “Lady Killer.” On the slick, disco-rock banger, the singer-songwriter steps into a Prince-adjacent funk aesthetic, trying on some swagger as she hits on a “straight” girl, letting her know know that “you think that you’re not sexual, ’cause with him … you’re not.”
The moment the song comes up in conversation, Zahm bursts into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. “You know what’s so funny about that song? Listening to it, you would genuinely have thought that I had this high body count and that I had been out there being a lady killer,” she says, “At the time I wrote that, I had made out with maybe two girls in my life. I live for the fact that it is so unhinged.”
As funny as Zahm finds the song, she also recognizes how important it is for her, along with the myriad other sapphic themes explored throughout her debut. Where You Might Not Like Her served as a vehicle for the songwriter’s coming out story, Now That I’ve Been Honest lets her bask in what it means to live as a queer woman in the modern day. As she says, her new album is an earned progression in her career and in her own life. “When I came out, especially to my hometown and the people that knew me as a worship leader, I didn’t want to be like ‘F–k you, I’m gay now,’” she says. “I wanted there to be conversation about it so that I then felt the freedom to release something like this.”
But as with so many of her other works, Zahm also makes sure to point out that this album is not just for herself. “I want someone to hear ‘Lady Killer,’ and I want someone to hear ‘Bedroom,’ and I want them to sound like something you would hear on the radio when girls sing about guys,” she says. “Those are the songs that I would have really loved to hear when I was coming out and wasn’t comfortable with my sexuality. Like, there is such a power in a simple breakup song about a girl.”
She pauses for a moment to consider what she’s just said, before nodding her head in affirmation: “I hope that it can provide them solace the way that writing it helped me.”
Post Malone was in his happy place on Tuesday morning (Oct. 17), chopping it up with Howard Stern on SiriusXM, playing some of his favorite covers, rocking out with a gospel choir and revealing that pop megastar Taylor Swift is a charter member of Team Posty.
When Stern asked Malone to recall which song of his Swift praised, Malone said the kind words came during a brief encounter backstage at a radio show, where Swift said she was blown away by his Grammy-nominated Beerbongs & Bentleys No. 7 Billboard Hot 100 hit “Better Now.”
“We were just passing by and she was like, ‘Oh my God! Nice to see you. ‘Better Now’ if f—in’ amazing!’,” he said Swift told him. “And I was like, ‘What?’That’s f—in’ crazy, you’re a great f—in’ songwriter! Thank you so very much.’” The kind words felt especially good for the self-described high school outcast, who told Stern that he still can’t quite figure out why he never fit in before blowing up into one of the most-streamed acts of the modern era.
“There’s so many beautiful artists in the world and for another artist to acknowledge that is a really, really b–chin’ thing. It’s a really special thing,” Malone said of Swift’s compliment. “That was a really cool moment and it was very inspiring.”
When Stern mentioned a story that claimed Swift’s Eras Tour was so mega that she could take the proceeds and give every person in America a $20 bill, Malone couldn’t wrap his head around that altitude of fame. But having met Taylor he said he’s not surprised at her latest level-up, which also includes the $97 million first-weekend gross for the Eras tour movie.
“It’s f—in’ so cool. It’s so cool,” he said of Swift’s constantly evolving success. “I recently got to hang out with her and she is genuinely one of the most kind and considerate and a f—in’ hell of a songwriter. Holy s–t, amazing,” Malone said of Taylor, who he described as “f—in’ destroying it” while he’s just “doing the best I can.”
Stern — who has graphically described his fascination (and fantasies) about Swift’s reported relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce on his show — then, of course, reminded famously skilled Beer Pong player Malone that he once lost a suds match to Kelce that resulted in the Dallas Cowboys fan getting a KC tattoo as punishment.
Because he knows Kelce, Stern asked Malone if he approves of the reported pop star relationship, which has been breathlessly covered by the NFL during Swift’s recent appearances at a string of Kelce’s games. “Yes sir. Whenever I met him he was the sweetest dude,” Malone said of Kelce. “You never know. Nowadays you never know. You meet a lot of people in the world and what’s cool is to see people that are successful — much like Taylor and Travis and [Chiefs QB] Patrick [Mahomes] — they really give a s–t about human beings. And I think that’s pretty bad ass.”
During the chat, Malone also talked about his love of Daisy Duke short shorts — and his decision to eat healthy on tour, which resulted in his noticeable weight loss — his lonely adolescence as an outcast and his plans to build a giant compound in an undisclosed location where he and his family can rest, relax and get away from the fame machine.
Malone, a legendary Bud Light fan and spokesperson, also said that he was not interested in the right-wing freakout over trans TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney getting some commemorative cans from the beer maker. “I have been drinking Bud Light since I was the legal age of 21 and I’m gonna f—in’ drink a nice cold f—in’ Bud Light, man. I really don’t give a s–t, man. I just wanna do what makes me feel comfortable.”
He also stuck around to play a haunting cover of Alice in Chains’ 1992 grunge classic “Them Bones” featuring a choir, as well as his original, “Landmine,” from this year’s Austin album.
If Taylor Swift ever decides to run for president, Grimes is ready to join her on the campaign trail.
The Canadian musician recently took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to unofficially endorse Swift as the leader of the United States’ executive branch should the pop star ever choose to run for the job. “In many ways Taylor Swift is the only presidential candidate who can unite the country,” Grimes proclaimed Tuesday (Oct. 17).
It wouldn’t be the first time a celebrity with no prior political experience stepped into the Oval Office, as the “Oblivion” singer, who shares three children with X owner Elon Musk, pointed out. “Trump v Swift is totally occurring in a parallel universe rn,” she added.
As fun as it is to imagine a White House decorated with pictures of Swift’s cats Meredith, Olivia and Benjamin, or a fleet of Secret Service bodyguards wearing Eras Tour friendship bracelets, the “Anti-Hero” singer actually isn’t logistically able to run for the top job for the next presidential election. Besides her touring commitments planned throughout 2024, law states that the U.S. president must be at least 35 years old to hold office; Swift turns 34 in December.
Still, Grimes isn’t the first person to support a Swift presidential bid. Earlier this month, The View‘s Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former communications staffer of twice-impeached former president Donald Trump, made headlines for saying that the 12-time Grammy winner could feasibly sweep America if she ever ran for commander in chief.
“To be honest, if Donald Trump looks like he’s gonna win, she’s just gonna need to get in the race and defeat him once and for all, because she’s probably the only person who can!” Griffin said during an episode of The View: Behind the Table podcast. “This ends in one way; we are all Taylor Swift fans.”
If Swift’s ability to win over Chiefs nation and NFL fans in general recently is any indication, Griffin might just be right. Ever since seemingly striking up a romance with Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce, the musician’s attendance at games has been proven to boost female viewership for the football league, and she’s become a go-to topic of conversation in sports media as of late.
See Grimes’ tweet about Taylor Swift’s chances as a presidential candidate below:
In many ways Taylor Swift is the only presidential candidate who can unite the country. Trump v Swift is totally occurring in a parallel universe rn https://t.co/NMU1CVBFiw— Grimes (@Grimezsz) October 17, 2023
Britney Spears‘ upcoming tell-all memoir, The Woman in Me, includes a shocking claim about her teenage romance with fellow Mickey Mouse Club star Justin Timberlake. The couple famously began dating in 1999, when she was 17 and the *NSYNC star was 18, just as their careers were exploding. “It was a surprise, but for me […]
It all comes back to pop music. Pop is the backbone not only of the music industry, but of culture in general: Nothing else connects people, defines moments and lives and passes down history from generation to generation the way pop does. It’s our shared language, our communal experience. It’s why wedding receptions are usually joyous and celebratory occasions even if the DJ doesn’t know a thing about the people they’re playing to, why karaoke can feel like a spiritual awakening in the right circumstances, why top 40 and oldies radio remain cultural staples a decade into the streaming era. There is no safer bet, no easier sell than pop music.
And yet, there’s been relatively little attempt to properly canonize modern pop’s greatest works and practitioners. While rock as a genre has been listed and anthologized to death over the past 50 years, and hip-hop and country are finally starting to catch up, such pop histories are relatively few and far between. There’s no official pop hall of fame, like there is for those other genres. It shouldn’t be possible for the biggest music on the planet to be overlooked, but it does feel that way sometimes.
So we here at Billboard have decided to take the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Billboard Hot 100 — with the chart finally having lived a full-enough life to be at retirement age, though it’s still as vital as ever and certainly nowhere near hanging it up — to take our shot at listing the 500 best pop songs since the chart’s debut. Though songs had to hail from the Hot 100 era to qualify for our list, this isn’t a charts-determined ranking: Rather, these are the songs our staff felt were simply the greatest, most enduring pop songs of that 65-year period, the songs that we most think of when we think of what pop music could and should be. (Because 500 is a much smaller number than you think when talking about 65 years of pop music, and because we wanted to be able to include as many different artists as possible, we capped the number of pop songs per lead artist at three.)
How are we defining “pop songs,” you might ask? Well, that’s a little tough: One of the reasons pop can be hard to summarize is because there’s no real sonic or musical definition to it. There are common elements to a lot of the biggest pop songs, but at the end of the day, “pop” means “popular” first and foremost, and just about any song that becomes popular enough — whether it be rock, dance, rap, R&B, country, reggaetón or some combination — can be considered a pop song. So the only hard-and-fast qualification we laid down for songs to be eligible for our list was that they had to have hit the Hot 100 at some point, in some version. (The only exception we made was for songs that came during the ’90s period where many huge airplay hits were ineligible for the Hot 100; read here for more details on that.)
All that said, the “pop” part of this project was still essential when determining our ranking. We were looking for the songs that most fit our idea of pop music — catchy, tight, rousing, emotional, immaculately crafted, instantly memorable. If a song didn’t strike us as an obvious pop song, we might have ranked it lower on our list than most other all-time songs lists have in the past, or left it off altogether. Conversely, if a song makes us go “now that’s a pop song!” every time we hear it, even if it’s not the kind of critically revered song that often ends up on all-time lists, we made sure to give it a little extra love here. Our definition of pop might differ from yours — we couldn’t even all agree on every song ourselves — but even if we can’t do much better than “we know it when we hear it,” we’re confident you’ll hear it plenty yourself while reading through the songs on our list.
Here are our staff’s 500 favorite pop songs since the introduction of the Billboard Hot 100 on Aug. 4th, 1958 — from Lesley Gore to Carly Rae Jepsen, from Sam Cooke to SZA, from The Kinks to The Chainsmokers, from Chubby Checker to Rae Sremmurd. We’ll be counting down from 500 to 301 today (Oct. 17), then from 300 to 101 on Wednesday, with the final 100 being unveiled on Thursday (Oct. 19), along with more related articles you can read all about here.
Join us below all week, and feel free to sing along; we know you know the words.
500. Los Del Rio, “Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)”
Image Credit: Evan Agostini/Liaison/Getty Images
Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera have been in the public eye for nearly their entire lives. The former Mickey Mouse Club stars began their careers alongside each other in the early 1990s and then both blew up the charts later in the decade during a period when the press constantly tried to pit them against each other in a manufactured battle of the pop divas.
So when Aguilera slipped onto the couch for a chat on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday night (Oct. 16), naturally the host wondered if XTina hopes to make a cameo in Spears’ eagerly anticipated tell-all memoir, The Woman in Me. “Do you think you will be in it?” Kimmel wondered. “Has she called you and said, ‘hey, heads up?’”
“Dude, I don’t know,” Aguilera smiled when Kimmel wondered if there might be a chapter on Spears’ chart rival, who, you might recall, like, Britney, also shared a kiss with Madonna at the 2003 MTV VMAs. “Are you hoping that you’re in it?” Kimmel asked.
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Aguilera said. “Am I hoping? I mean, I’m hoping that, you know, everything is all good with her and everything’s beautiful. I think the future should be celebrated.”
Okay, fine, Kimmel said, but if she had to choose between being in the book — which comes out on Oct. 24 — and not being in the book, what would Aguilera prefer? “Um…you know… for real?” she stammered as Kimmel said he would definitely like to be mentioned in the book that covers Spears’ difficult 13-year conservatorship, her famous head-shaving incident and Britney’s difficult relationship with her estranged father, Jamie Spears.
“Maybe you will be in it. Let’s put it this way,” Aguilera said. “I’d rather be it you than me. So hopefully you’ll be in it. You’ll make the book.”
Aguilera also described her family’s way over-the-top Halloween decorations — including a haunted house with different levels of fright and previewed her upcoming intimate Las Vegas show at the Voltaire Belle de Nuit at the Venetian Resort Las Vegas that kicks off on New Year’s Eve weekend.
Watch Aguilera on Jimmy Kimmel Live! below.
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Lance Bass made sure that no one at the Cowboys-Chargers game on Monday (Oct. 16) got their expectations too high. After SoFi Stadium alerted the crowd that a star was in the midst and showed the *NSYNC band member on its jumbotrons, Bass held up a sign clarifying that he wasn’t one of the NFL‘s most famous recent guests: Taylor Swift.
“Not Taylor Swift,” read Bass’ handwritten sign, which he held up to the cameras as he waved to the thousands of fans in attendance.
The singer shared a video of the moment on Instagram, showing how SoFi played his band’s iconic song “Bye Bye Bye” over the speakers. “In case anyone was confused,” he captioned the post. “#LookWhatYouMadeMeDo #GoChargers ! #NotTaylorSwift #MNF”
Bass’ sign poked fun at the pop culture craze surrounding Swift’s romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, with whom she was photographed twice holding hands over the weekend in New York City. The “Anti-Hero” singer has shown up to three of Kelce’s games so far, and is often shown by NFL cameras sharing a box suite with the athlete’s mom, Donna Kelce.
And while there are millions of Swifties who would love to see the pop star’s face appear on jumbotrons at any given NFL game, many of Bass’ fans assured him that they’d be just as excited to see him in the stands. “Honestly I would be more excited at seeing Lance Bass then Taylor swift 🤣” commented one fan.
“Lance…you’re the Taylor Swift of 20 years ago,” added another.
In fact, Swift just might be one of those fans. In September, she gushed over her love for *NSYNC at the VMAs after the band reunited onstage to present her with an award. “I had your dolls,” the “Karma” musician told the guys. “Like, are you doing something? What’s going to happen now … They’re going to do something and I need to know what it is!”
Soon after the awards show, Bass, Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Chris Kirkpatrick and Joey Fatone announced plans to release their first full-band song in 20 years. “Better Place” arrived Sept. 29 as part of the soundtrack for Trolls Band Together, which aptly focuses on a boy band reunion.
See Bass’ video below:
Britney Spears has promised that her upcoming memoir The Woman in Me will allow the singer to tell her story in full for the first time. In a pair of excerpts of the tell-all book due out Oct. 24 shared with People, Britney pulls back the curtain on two of the most painful, publicly scrutinized periods of her public life.
Spears was finally released from a highly restrictive court-ordered conservatorship in Nov. 2021, 13 years after her estranged father Jamie and a court-appointed lawyer were given near-total control over her personal and financial affairs. In the excerpt in People, Spears says the conservatorship had a profound effect on her.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” Spears, 41, writes. “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
The arrangement made her feel like “a shadow of myself,” Britney says in attempting to describe how she would vacillate between feeling like a little girl, a teenager and a woman, “because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom. There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.”
And, in a nod to the book’s title, Spears writes that the “woman in me was pushed down for a long time,” describing how her team wanted her to be “wild” onstage (“the way they told me to be”), but to be robotic the rest of the time. It was, she says, “death to my creativity as an artist.”
Spears has been much more vocal since the end of the conservatorship after what she described as 15 years of allowing others to tell her story for her. Afterwards, she says, “I was finally free to tell my story without consequences from the people in charge of my life. It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out. And my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracy, no more lies — just me owning my past, present and future.”
The book also probes one of the most-dissected moments that helped precipitate the conservatorship, a 2007 incident in which she shaved her head in public during a tumultuous period in which tabloids constantly swarmed her in the midst of a divorce from second husband Kevin Federline.
“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,” Spears says in another People book excerpt in which she explains her frame of mind at the time. “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.”
The book also reveals that in the wake of the head-shaving and some other concerning actions, she was place in the conservatorship in 2008. Once under the control of her father and the lawyer, Britney says she was not allowed to keep her close-cropped look.
“Under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over,” she says. “I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.” She also claims — in another excerpt — that her dad’s comments about her body were even worse than the criticism from the press. “He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it,” she claims.
Despite being put in the conservatorship over concerns about her mental health, Spears released four albums during the 13-year arrangement and headlined a four-year run of her Las Vegas Piece of Me residency despite writing that she was miserable the whole time.
“I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore,” Spears says. “As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point,” she writes in the book whose audio version will be narrated by five-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams. “Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself.”
Spears says it makes her “feel sick” now to think of her father his his associates having control over her body and money for that long.
“Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues,” she says. “No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”
Erin Andrews for the win. After using her podcast to publicly urge Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce to start dating — which the two eventually did, based on recent photos of them holding hands — the sports commentator has now opened up about her matchmaking success in a new interview with TODAY.
“I’m the new Bumble,” Andrews joked to hosts Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie on Tuesday (Oct. 17).
“I have left him alone, although I am going to bug him this week because I just want to check in,” she added, noting that Kelce never asked her to endorse him to Swift. “I know him obviously, better than her. He looks adorable.”
To recap, Andrews and her Calm Down podcast cohost Charissa Thompson served as wing-women for Kelce back in August. After hearing that the Kansas City tight end had tried unsuccessfully to give his phone number to Swift at an Eras Tour show, they implored the “Anti-Hero” musician to “please try our friend Travis, he is fantastic!”
“Take us up on this — go on a date with this guy,” Andrews had urged at the time. “Do it for America.”
Less than two months later, Swift made a surprise appearance at the Chiefs vs. Chicago Bears game at Arrowhead Stadium, where she was spotted cheering on Kelce alongside his mom, Donna, and leaving the stadium with the football star at her side after the game. And that Chiefs jacket the pop superstar has been spotted wearing? Andrews revealed on TODAY that she sent it to Swift. “I sent her the team apparel jacket and she wore it!” the sports commentator gushed. “I just sent it to her, and you never know if people will really wear it, and she showed up!”
Swift has now attended several games, and the pop star was most recently spotted with Kelce over the weekend, holding hands as they grabbed dinner in New York City.
The night before that, the two made their public debut as a couple. After they both made surprise cameos in Saturday Night Live‘s season 49 premiere episode, Swift and Kelce attended the afterparty together.
On TODAY, Andrews reacted to the hand-holding photos seen ’round the world. “He’s got a glow to him,” she said of Kelce. “That’s a glow up, girls. He looks fantastic.”
And while the world will probably never know what exactly motivated Swift to give Kelce a chance, the athlete himself saluted Andrews and Thompson earlier this month for their efforts in swaying the singer in his direction. “😂😂 You two are something else!! 🙌🏻🙌🏻 I owe you big time!!” he commented on one of their Instagram posts.
“I’m a huge fan of his, work with him, he’s great,” Andrews added about Kelce on TODAY. “He sent Mack [Andrews’ newborn son] an adorable baby gift just out of the blue, so sweet, and I was just like, ‘Check, check and check.’”
Watch the interview below:
We’re catching up with @ErinAndrews! She’s opening up about her journey from IVF into motherhood with help from a surrogate, mom guilt, and even spills the story behind “setting up” Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift — and *that* Chiefs jacket. pic.twitter.com/bDKksLaPnu— TODAY (@TODAYshow) October 17, 2023