Taylor Swift's Tiny Desk Concert (NPR)
Taylor performed a Tiny Desk concert @ NPR last week which got released today.
edit: the embed don't work so watch the full performance video at the SOURCE
SET LIST
"The Man"
"Lover"
"Death by a Thousand Cuts""All Too Well"
HIGHLIGHTS
- Introducing "The Man": "There’s a song I wanted to write conceptually for a long time because over the course of my life it has occurred to me that we have a bit of a double standard issue in our society. It’s something I’ve thought about 700 million times a day for the last ten years of my life. And I was always just wondering can I write a song about this? Is there a concise and catchy way I can write a song about this? What angle would I take if I were to write a song about this? So I decided the most fun thing to do would be to imagine my life and what people would say about my life if I did all the same things if I was a man.”
- Introducing "Lover": "There’s a line in the song that I’m really proud of, the line says ‘With every guitar string scar on my hand, I take this magnetic force a man to be my lover.’ And that line is really special to me because I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing break-up songs. And ah songs about things not turning out the way you wanted them to or songs about what you thought would be love but it turned out to not be that at all, or you know, just kind of the struggle of life. Songwriting is just really a cathartic, therapeutic thing for me, so there are a lot of things I’ve written about in my life that were the harder things I had to go through. So, I took that as a metaphor for like, you know, the times I was learning to play guitar and I played til my fingers bled when I was a kid and I still have those marks from that. And you know, all the times I would be changing a string and it would pop and I still have scars from that. But it’s also a bigger metaphor for like, in life you accumulate scars, you accumulate hurt, you accumulate moments of learning and disappointment and struggle and all that. If someone is going to take your hand, they better take your hand, scars and all."
- Introducing "Death by a Thousand Cuts": “Over the course of the years that I’ve done interviews, which is like 15 or 16 years now, I’ve gotten a question over and over again that I think has like the potential to seriously deteriorate my mental health. The question is, ‘What will you ever do if you get happy? Like what will you write about? Will you just never be able to write a song again?’ Interesting question… you know in interviews when I would get that question as a young person, I’d kinda be like, well I started writing songs I had no about. Like I started writing songs at 12 years old about heartbreak which I had no idea what I was talking about. But I watched movies and I read books and I’d grab inspiration from character dynamics as you do. So I would say in the interviews ‘oh, I’d probably do that, like if stuff is going on that’s not just happening to me, maybe I could grab inspiration from that’. But then I’d go home and be like.. what would happen if I ever got happy? Would I not be able to do the thing I love most in the world? OMG, would I not be able to write break up songs anymore? I love breakup songs! They’re so fun to write! Then I happened to be writing this album 'Lover’ which is very, very happy and romantic album. In my life a few of my friends were going through breakups and it’s those kind of break ups where you need to talk to your friend all the time cause they need to talk about it all day every day. I was having a lot of conversations about breakups, I watched movies that were really well done with break ups, in some of the books I was reading there were good break ups happening. So this all culminated in me waking up one day with all these break up lyrics in my head and I was like, 'It’s still here, YES!’ So I ended up writing a song that was a breakup song on the 'Lover’ album and I was like this song is my proof that you don’t have to stop writing songs about heartache and misery, which for me is incredible news.”
- Introducing "All Too Well": “I was trying to think of songs for this and I think you get like four so I was thinking about how in autumn that’s like my favorite season and people on the internet have been kind enough to associate autumn with one of my albums called RED. So I was thinking about that, and I don’t google myself ever, I recommend to not do it but my Dad does. And he will send me links to things every once in a while, he sends me these lists where people rank my songs and that’s really nice of people to do and I’m grateful people care enough to rank my songs. There’s one song I’m particularly proud of because when the RED album came out I was like I’m the only one who loves this song this much only because it happened to me and it’s personal. No one else is going to like ATW as much as me and when it came out slowly but surely over the course of that albums life and beyond, you guys made that song something that was way more than I ever thought the life of that song would be. I’ve had so much fun playing it in concert and screaming it with you guys. It’s usually #1 on like any list which is great and I’m happy my opinion lines up with yours cause that’s probably my favorite song on RED. So here's a sad song about fall.”
Source
(mods i fixed some formatting)