Wednesday’s highly anticipated “New Heights” podcast featuring special guest star Taylor Swift resumed late Wednesday night after a glitch interrupted its live premiere on YouTube.
More than 1 million people were watching the 14-time Grammy winner discuss the theme of her new album, “The Life of a Showgirl” — a 12-track album that will be released on Oct. 3 — when the livestream went dark about one hour and 44 minutes in.
The show returned at 12:37 a.m. ET on Aug. 14 after the “New Heights” X account shared the link to the show and said “WE ARE BACK!!!!” with a heart on fire emoji.
When the show went down, the podcast account posted on X, “We hit a glitch but will be back shortly!!!”
“Shoutout all the 92%ers and swifties for actually helping us break the internet.”
Fever superstar Caitlin Clark recognized the power of the Swifties and pondered the possibility of a crash earlier in the day.
“Are we sure YouTube isn’t going to crash tonight?” Clark wrote on X Wednesday afternoon.
Prior to the glitch, Swift revealed the cover art of “The Life of a Showgirl” before sharing the track list.
Boyfriend Travis Kelce said he knows a lot about the album, teasing it’s “upbeat” and differs from her most recent album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” which dropped last April.
“Life is more upbeat,” Swift said while smiling at the three-time Super Bowl champ.
Swift explained that the album cover for “The Life of a Showgirl,” which features a glamorous shot of the singer floating in a bathtub clad in a bedazzled stage dress, represents “the end of my night” when she exits the stage following a physically demanding performance, a la her three-hour Eras Tour set.
“So when I’m on tour, I have the same day every single day. … And my day ends with me in a bathtub, not usually in a bedazzled dress,” she said. “I wanted to sort of like glamorize all the different aspects of how that tour felt. And that’s how that felt to like be at the end of the night when all this has gone down. You won’t be able to get to bed till four in the morning after this. But you had to jump through 50 million hoops in this obstacle course that is your show. And you did it. You got two more in a row. But you did it tonight.
“And the reason I wanted to have sort of like an offstage moment as the main album cover is because this album isn’t really about what happened to me on stage. It’s about what I was going through offstage. So I didn’t want to have like the lights are bright, I’m on the stage as the main album cover. It’s just this. This, to me, tells more of what the actual content, lyrically, of the album are.”
Swift said she worked on the album in Europe last summer as she performed the international leg of the Eras Tour. The performances concluded in Canada in December.
