Taylor Swift has revealed that she’s hoping to play different surprise songs at every single night of her mammoth ‘Eras’ tour, as well as taking requests from Jack Antonoff and Gracie Abrams.
Swift kicked off the tour last month with a huge 44-song set that pulled from across her back catalogue. While the bulk of the setlist has remained the same, every night she’s performed a couple of “surprise” acoustic songs.
Last night (April 1), during her second show at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, Taylor Swift said: “So far on this tour, I’ve been playing different songs every night. The goal is to not repeat one, so that every time I play a song in the acoustic set, it’s the one time I’ll play it [this tour].”
“Unless I mess it up, in which case I’ll have to play it again at some point to redeem myself,” she added.
Last night, she also confirmed that “I do take requests if they’re phrased in a polite way.”
Swift then went on to explain that the first surprise song was requested by “one of my closest friends and my collaborator of dreams, Jack Antonoff who’s actually here tonight.”
“I’ve played this song live once before and the crowd screamed the bridge so loudly that I kept telling him about it. ‘I wished you’d been there, it was so insane.’ We wrote this song together and I really want him to hear you do it so I’m really hoping you know the words to this song,” she said, before playing ‘Death By A Thousand Cuts’.
“I had so much fun doing the bridge, do you want to do it again,” she asked the crowd during the song before stumbling over the lyrics.
Taking to the piano, Swift announced that the second surprise song was also a “request from someone who is here tonight, Gracie Abrams” [who opened the show].
“We text,” revealed Swift. “And she was so excited for the tour and I told her, by the way, I do an acoustic set and she said ‘would you play ‘Clean’?”
Commenting on a TikTok stream of the concert, Swift wrote: “I think I could have done [‘Clean’] better in a higher key, so that’s technically a mess up,” suggesting that both ‘Clean’ and ‘Death By A Thousand Cuts’ will be played again at some point during the ‘Eras’ tour.
Earlier on in the show, Swift called Abrams “one of my absolute favourite artists” and one of Abrams’ friends captured her reaction to the shout out, before sharing it on socials.
At a previous show on the ‘Eras’ tour, Taylor Swift was joined by Marcus Mumford to perform their ‘Evermore’ collab ‘Cowboy Like Me’.
Elsewhere during the tour, Swift also responded to a letter from a seven-year-old fan in the audience, dedicated ‘Our Song’ to support act Beabadoobee, and gave a shout-out to Lana Del Rey before giving their collaboration ‘Snow On The Beach’ its live debut.
A couple even got married mid-show at the second gig in Glendale, Arizona while the singer-songwriter also quietly made “generous” donations to local food banks in the cities where she performed.