The entire Kansas City Chiefs organization is keeping it 100 with their tireless support of Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl.
Defensive tackle Chris Jones upped the ante on Thursday, October 30, when he played Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” as he walked into his latest press conference.
“And on the land, the sea, the sky,” he sang along, taking his position at the podium. “How we doing?”
After local reporters asked what the name of the song was, Jones, 31, confidently answered, “The Fate of Ophelia.” The NFL star also pulled up the track on his phone and played more at the end of his media briefing, adding, “Y’all take care.”
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Swift, 35, subtly endorsed Jones’ rendition of her song by “liking” a TikTok video of the conference.
The pop star has been a key member of Chiefs Kingdom ever since she started dating her now-fiancé, Travis Kelce, in 2023. Swift’s Chiefs fandom has extended beyond attending games, even baking homemade Pop-Tarts for Jones and the rest of the team. Swift and Kelce, 36, also sent holiday gifts to Jones’ family last year.
Amid Swift’s romance with Kelce, she wrote The Life of a Showgirl about her relationship and life beyond the Eras Tour stage. “The Fate of Ophelia,” specifically, features nods to Kelce, falling in love and football.
The song offers a twist on the William Shakespeare’s Hamlet heroine, who tragically died after being manipulated by the men in her life.
“I have a big file of lyrics, [which] is so long and so weird. There are just so many,” Swift said during her “Release Party of a Showgirl” theatrical event, detailing her songwriting process. “When I’ll be in a writing session, I’ll be scrolling through this file. It was actually [producer] Shellback who came up with this really cool chord progression, and I was just singing on top of it, and my eyes scanned across ‘The Fate of Ophelia.’”
She continued, “I was like, ‘Wait, so Ophelia drowned because Hamlet just messed with her head so much that she went crazy and she couldn’t take it anymore, and all these men were just gaslighting her until she drowned.’ It’s like, ‘What if the hook was like you saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia?’”
At the time, Swift hinted that her current partner is “the reason [she didn’t] end up like this tragic, poetic hero girl who passed away in a fictional world.”
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Jones is not the only Chiefs star who can’t stop listening to Showgirl — Kelce is undoubtedly Swift’s biggest fan.
“I’m just the lucky man that gets to be, you know, the support system for Taylor while she drops one of the coolest albums that I’ve ever listened to, that the world’s seen,” Kelce said on the October 8 episode of his podcast. “I’m excited for her. I’m happy for her.”
He added, “Everything seems to have gone perfectly, all this planning. You see it from start to finish. She started this thing in the middle of her tour in Europe. To see it all unfold and come together and her connect the dots — from the strategic planning to how the album was all going to look — then listen to the music, and everything comes together.”
