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Pop superstar Taylor Swift got emotional when she discussed reclaiming ownership to her first six studio albums during her first appearance on the New Heights podcast alongside her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs Travis Kelce, and his brother, retired former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, on Wednesday (August 13).
Swift said her mother, Andrea, called her to tell her the news, at which point she was overwhelmed with tears and attempted to "tell Travis in a normal way."
"I knock on the door, he's playing video games, and I'm trying to say it in a normal way, and I'm just like, 'Travis,'" Swift said before adding that Kelce suspected something was wrong at the time.
"You just come up and I'm just like, 'I got all my music back,' and then just start absolutely heaving," she added.
Swift said her first six studio albums being sold for the first time in June "really ripped my heart out of my chest."
"I thought about not owning my music every day," she added. "And I told everybody exactly how that felt for me and what I was going through. And I started, basically, defiantly re-recording my music because I wanted to own it, and this was the only way I thought it was ever going to happen."
Swift said that record labels own the rights to artists' music until they purchase the masters, which she had been attempting to do since for years prior to Big Machine Records initially selling them to Scooter Braun in 2019, who then resold the masters to Shamrock Capital the next year. The singer finally repurchased the rights to her masters in May 2025.