Taylor Swift on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, December 2025. Tap to watch the audiobooks moment.
Prefer to listen? Narrated by Stephanie Németh-Parker.
Stephen Colbert asked Taylor Swift a simple question in December 2025. After the biggest year of an already huge career, how does she actually unwind? She could have said skydiving. She could have said cooking. Or welding. But she said audiobooks, right there on national TV.
“Do you do audiobooks?” Colbert asked. “Yes. Constantly,” she said. It’s always a different one, and the second she finishes one, she starts the next.
The good, ordinary joy of it
The lovely part is how ordinary the pleasure is, and how gleefully specific Ms. Swift got. She wanted an old, rambling British mansion covered in moss or ivy. A mysterious relationship. A man who might not be what he seems. A murder in the past that you only hear whispers of. Then she kept building. A family compound on an island off the coast of Maine. A brother nobody has seen in ten years, who just showed up. A marriage that isn’t what it looks like. And the punchline, on live TV, to a full studio: “Plot twist, unreliable narrator, she’s [that is, the herione unreliable narrator in the book] the psycho!”
If a book has any of that, she said, she’s going to need to read it. And when she says read it, she means she needs somebody to read it to her.
Swift finishes an audiobook and starts another the same day, always something new going. So if you’ve ever felt a little sheepish about how many audiobooks you tear through, or how fast, take this as your permission slip. The biggest pop star on the planet does the exact same thing. You’re not strange. You’re in good company.
No debate about whether it counts as reading. Just someone who loves stories, and listening to great storytellers.
What this means to you
The way we audiobook listeners take in a story is the same way one of the most imaginative people alive takes in hers. That pull she described, a voice drawing you into an old house where something’s not right, is exactly what a good narrator does with any book you hand them.
Our view
That’s the whole shout-out. Taylor Swift builds worlds for a living, and the way she wants a story when she not working is by someone reading it to her. A narrator who didn’t click with her would never have carried her that far into a book. She kept listening because the voice was good enough to keep her there. To everyone already listening, to the narrators doing the reading, to the publishers making it, and to anyone eyeing their first one. Keep going. It’s good stuff, and you’re in fine company.
Watch the moment for yourself: Taylor Swift on listening to audiobooks (the link opens the clip at the audiobooks exchange).
Source: “Why Taylor Swift Doesn’t Want A Recording Studio In Her Home (But Cats Are OK),” The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, YouTube, Dec. 10, 2025. Audiobooks exchange at 4:49.