Taylor Swift is back on her hijinks. This time, she surprised fans by adding an entire section to The Eras Tour setlist for “The Tortured Poets Department.”
What songs from ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ did Taylor Swift add to The Eras Tour?
Swift shocked fans about two and a half hours into the Paris Night One show when the scene started following a shortened version of “Bad Blood” and started to move into something fans haven’t seen yet.
Creepy cages fell from the ceiling on screen and haunting sounds filled the stage as the atmosphere shifted into the deeply emotional “Tortured Poets Department” aesthetic, and Swift started singing, “I forget how the West was won” — the opening line from “But Daddy I Love Him.”
She ultimately performed six full songs and a partial version of “So High School.”
During “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?” Swift levitated across a moving reflective box along to the lyrics of, “So I leap from the gallows and I levitate down your street.” It was truly a mesmerizing performance to a song Swift has opened up about being about the challenges she’s faced growing up in the music industry.
A UFO rained lasers upon the crowd during “Down Bad,” a reference to the lyrics “Did you really beam me up” from the song. The angle also creates the illusion that Swift is actually getting beamed up.
During “Fortnight,” Swift sat on a spinning desk that was placed upon a “The Tortured Poets Department” hospital bed while typing at a typewriter across from one of her backup dancers.
Adding in a costume change, Swift put on a jacket over her gothic wedding dress and then performed an elaborately choreographed version of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”
For the final song in the set, she and her dancers shifted tone and moved to a more theatrical mode, and the dancers began “dressing Swift up” like a doll in preparation for “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” — a song centered around Swift continuing to perform while moving through grief and depression.
The songs from ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ she added to setlist:
- “But Daddy I Love Him.”
- “So High School” (a shortened version).
- “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?”
- “Down Bad.”
- “Fortnight.”
- “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”
- “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.”
The YouTube streamer Hockey Bro hosted a stream that had more than 100,000 viewers and he mentioned it was “definitely the most watched stream” yet.
What songs did Taylor Swift remove from The Eras Tour?
In order to accommodate the new songs, Swift adjusted most of the other eras. Here are the songs she removed:
- “The Archer” | “Lover” era.
- “‘tis damn the season” | “evermore” era.
- “tolerate it” | “evermore” era.
- “Long Live” | “Speak Now” era.
- “the last great american dynasty” | “folklore” era.
Clues that Taylor Swift would add ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ to The Eras Tour
Before the performance, fans speculated whether Swift would change the massive Eras Tour setlist to include performances from her newest album. According to her French tour promoter, that’s exactly what she was planning.
“We will discover a slightly modified show since she has released a new album,” France Inter Arnaud Meersseman, general manager of AEG Presents and French player for Taylor Swift said, per France Info.
He added, “So she is going to include new pieces from her new album.”
In the show, Swift includes a segment where she performs two surprise acoustic songs — one on the guitar and one on the piano. The “slightly modified” line from the tour promoter led fans to assume she would be doing more than just including some of the new songs in the already established set.
Earlier this month, Swift posted a YouTube shorts video with clips of herself during rehearsal for The Eras Tour with the caption “A fortnight til Paris,” and eagle-eyed fans spotted a sign prop with the acronym “TTPD,” as well as a shot of her playing a song on a white guitar. The video also follows the sepia coloring aesthetic Swift used for the album.
A fan in the stadium also released a photo Thursday of a stuffed monkey and what appears to be a wedding dress hidden under The Eras Tour stage.