The closest Swift came to alluding to the recent tabloid attention she’s received came when she was introducing “Ours,” the mesmerizingly sweet final single off her previous album. Not always - I believe in love! But I think that this was an important song for me to write personally.” That was an interesting thing for me to write about, the idea of actually moving on and there being hope after the crash-and-burn that always happens. And… I wrote this song about the idea that you could kind of remember who you used to be by meeting someone new who… celebrates the things about you that the other person used to criticize you endlessly for.
Which I never would do,” she said, tentatively, before adding the kicker: “ Always do. Of the latter song, Swift said, “I think the worst part about a breakup sometimes, if one could choose a worst part, would possibly be if you get out of a relationship and you don’t recognize yourself, because you changed a lot about yourself to make that person like you. Seeing her chat spontaneously and sing and play guitar (and banjo) on a stage without trap doors - while wearing the same knee-length white dress all evening - proved she’d still stand as the Best People Person Since Bill Clinton even if she never had mastered the arts of the quick costume change and flying over a Staples Center crowd.Īfter opening with “You Belong With Me,” Swift introduced “Red” as a song about thinking of a relationship as “the worst thing ever and the best thing ever at the same time.” (In other words, it’s her “My Favorite Mistake.”) If you study timelines, you might suppose that that fiery tune was written about the bad boy she fell in love (or lust) with prior to meeting the good guy who is the subject of the far more tender “Begin Again.” Like a savant who skips several grades, Swift proceeded in her late teens directly from being LeAnn Rimes’ or Brad Paisley’s opening act to putting on Madonna-scale arena spectacles. She’s not any more likely to allow a new tune to be YouTubed before its time than she is to allow the word “Kennedy” to accidentally escape her lips on stage.īut regardless of how many fresh revelations there were, the evening was still a pleasure for anyone who realized that Swift was covering the middle performance ground she skipped in her career - that is, playing a headliner set without huge production values. Anyone in the live audience hoping she’d debut unheard music from the CD had to be content with three of the four singles she’d already released from the album through iTunes, which have collectively sold a whopping 3.5 million units in advance of the full album’s release. 11, ostensibly to promote her fourth studio album, Red, which comes out next Monday and will likely generate the year’s biggest first-week numbers. The nine-song set was taped for broadcast on Nov. PHOTOS: iHeartRadio Music Festival Features No Doubt, Taylor Swift and a Green Day Meltdown She didn’t have to name names to gain the confidence of a couple thousand new BFFs. That’s not to say the co-eds themselves had any reason to feel cheated: Swift has a knack for seemingly being utterly intimate, guileless, and disarming in exploring the general details of turning her personal life into hit parade fodder, even when she’s being necessarily withholding. Any tabloid reporters who snuck in would have found the evening a wash. talking about her tunes in front of an audience of almost 2,500 at Harvey Mudd College students. So the idea of her taping a VH1 Storytellers raised some intrigue among fans, in case the format would lead her to reveal more about the subjects of her songs, who, in her adult dating life, have tended to be fellow celebrities.īut she was at her most circumspect Monday night in Claremont, Calif. Taylor Swift has made a career for herself as a kiss-and-tell kind of girl - or kiss and semi-tell, since she usually refuses to name names in her confessional songwriting.