Taylor Swift is concluding the U.S. portion of her Eras tour with eight west coast shows outside San Francisco and in Los Angeles, and last night’s performance at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Ca., featured another unannounced appearance last night by longtime collaborator Aaron Dessner of the National.
During the “surprise songs” portion of the show, the artists teamed on acoustic guitars for the live debut of “Right Where You Left Me” from the deluxe edition of the 2020 album evermore, which Dessner co-produced and co-wrote.
“Because it is one of our favorites, there’s just more pressure on it,” Swift said beforehand. “Also, this is one of the wordiest songs. I have been rehearsing this for weeks, OK? And I’ve never, ever gotten it 100% right. Not even one time. If this is the time that I get it right, you have no idea what kind of celebration I’m going to be exhibiting after that. And also, this goes for you. If you can get all the words right to this song, you get to pat yourself on the back. You win an imaginary prize. It’s yours. We love this song and I hope that I somewhat do it justice.”
Sure enough, Swift fumbled the lyric “I could feel the mascara run / You told me that you met someone” and stopped the song to admit, “It was too good to be true! I knew that I would fuck that up! We really can’t let that be it, so now we’ve got to go back.” She and Dessner resumed where they left off and finished the song without further incident, as the sold-out crowd of 70,000 roared its approval.
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The second surprise song was the live debut of “Castles Crumbling” from the recently released “Taylor’s Version” re-record of her 2010 album Speak Now. The studio version features Paramore’s Hayley Williams, but Swift tackled the track last night solo on piano.
Swift will wrap the U.S. portion of the record-breaking Eras your Aug. 9 in Los Angeles with opening acts Haim and Gracie Abrams, after which she’ll perform Aug. 24-27 in Mexico City for the tour’s North American finale. South American dates begin Nov. 9 in Buenos Aires, with an Asian leg scheduled to get underway Feb. 7 in Tokyo and a European outing starting May 9 in Paris.
