Last month, Taylor Swift surprised fans with one of her first live performances since wrapping up The Eras Tour. Except, this wasn’t your usual pop show by a long shot. For her eight-minute Icon Sessions set at the Grammy Museum, Taylor plucked three hits from over the stretch of her career, reinventing them into piano ballads so stellar that it’s left some fans sobbing as they comment, “This video feels like a hug.”
Taylor’s latest set has taken the internet by storm, racking up more than 4 million views within a matter of days. Music Man readers can watch the magic unfold in the video below…
Taking to the small stage, Taylor didn’t just serve a run-of-the-mill greatest hits medley but led fans through an intimate exploration of her twenty-year songwriting career: spilling secrets in a forty-minute interview finalized by a medley tracing both fan favorites and Taylor’s latest single, “I Knew It, I Knew You.”
And as if the moment couldn’t become any more special for Taylor’s biggest fans, the songstress brought back the iconic flower-power piano she’d traveled the world with during The Eras Tour to deliver her medley live.
But what spurred Taylor to rewrite her hits in this acoustic performance? The star revealed, “One of my favourite things that I would do on The Eras Tour, something that […] the fans paid a lot of attention to and would make a lot of guesses about every night, was I had this section called the acoustic section. I would do different songs every night; one on guitar and one on piano.
“I started to really have a blast with creating medleys towards the middle-end part of the tour and really think about different songs I could mash up with other songs that would be surprising; a kind of a ‘surprise and delight’ moment for fans.
“A way that I would kind of pick the songs was I’d find some sort of through-line, whether that was rhythmically, or these […] are all about a similar emotion. And I prepared one for you today that, if I was still on The Eras Tour, I would do this one. It’s songs that are connected to each other by the common theme of being about memory and reliving certain detailed memories of your life and the significance of those memories.”
Cue Taylor’s breathtaking live mash-up of “I Knew It, I Knew You,” “August” and “All Too Well,” and the sound of Swift fans spiraling with awe as they discover this brand new clip.
One top commenter spoke for over 1,500 viewers when they realized, “This is for the fans. It feels like she’s saying ‘I’m still here with you, I remember us – you have my past (‘All Too Well’), my present (‘August’ sung in August) and my future (new/latest music, ‘I Knew You’). She’s honeymooning and living life quietly right now as she deserves… but this was for us. She won’t be gone long.”
Curious to watch Taylor Swift’s entire Grammys interview? Just hit play on our second video above!