Happy birthday, Travis Kelce! The Kansas City Chiefs tight end celebrates his 36th birthday on Sunday, October 5, a day before he joins his team in taking on the Jacksonville Jaguars for another round of Monday Night Football. The celebration also coincides with one going in tandem for his fiancée Taylor Swift, who dropped her 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl on Friday, October 3. Despite polarizing critical and fan reviews, the LP has already broken several records and is on track to become her fastest selling album ever.
As such, fans have spent all 48+ hours since then dissecting each and every lyric, and especially trying to parse out which ones point to her new hubby. While the desire for a more stable home life in "Wi$h Li$t" and the romantic overtures of lead single "The Fate of Ophelia" immediately stick out, it's track nine, "Wood," that has really struck a chord.
The song uses Redwood as a double entendre for the phrase "knock on wood" and also a lover's manhood. With lyrics like "Redwood tree, it ain't hard to see/His love was thе key that opened my skies" (in the clean version, at least…) and "New Heights of manhood/I ain't gotta knock on wood," it's not hard to see what Taylor's hinting at.
As a result, fans flooded the comments section of social media posts from the Chiefs' official page celebrating Travis with birthday wishes for him, all cheekily referring to him as "Redwood." Some of those include: "Happy birthday to the redwood tree (it ain't hard to see)," and: "36 YEARS OF REDWOOD," plus: "His nickname is Redwood now, iykyk."
Although, one person who, it turns out, is not a fan of Travis' birthday? Travis himself. During an episode of New Heights with his brother Jason on October 1, when the idea of his birthday was brought up, he said: "It's not a good day, it's just an annoying day for me." Even when Jason proposed pulling up some birthday stats, Travis retorted: "I don't want to get into the Grinch of birthdays, but I'm just not in on birthdays."
However, one thing that is bringing the podcast host some joy is wedding planning with Taylor, who's spoken extensively about her engagement to the NFL star and how the happiness she feels with him has bled into her songwriting as well. "I used to have this dark fear that if I ever were truly happy and free, being myself and nurtured by a relationship, what happens if the writing just dries up?" she told BBC Radio 1.
Taylor, who has earned both acclaim and notoriety with her deeply rich and confessional lyrics about heartbreak and betrayal in romance, continued: "What if writing is directly tied to my torment and pain? And it turns out, that's not the case at all, and we just were catching lightning in a bottle with this record."
"But it's nice because you're from a place of happiness and love, you can go back to those places. You can look forward to other things."