Taylor Swift brought her guitar and stripped down four tracks for her NPR Tiny Desk concert in D.C. She mostly performed tracks from her newest record, Lover, but threw in one extra surprise for the guests.
“Wow! This is a lot of people in a tiny office,” she said as she walked in the room in a checkered pantsuit. “I love it!”
“Tiny Desk is like one of my favorite corners of the internet… It’s an opportunity for artists to decide a different way to showcase their music. You’re kind of inundated by different opportunity and choices… I just decided to take this as an opportunity to show you guys how the songs sounded when I first wrote them.”
Swift started things off with one of our favorite tracks from her new album, “The Man.” She told the audience she’d been trying to find a way to tackle sexism in a song for quite some time.
“I decided the most fun thing to do would be to imagine what my life would be like and what people would say about me if I did all the same things but if I was a man.”
She then went to the piano for “Lover” before picking the guitar up again for “Death by a Thousand Cuts.” She wrote the latter while some of her friends were dealing with agonizing breakups, hence the painful nature of the track.
Although most Tiny Desk concerts stop at four songs, Swift kept going with one more that was a little surprise for the more than 300 guests. It was a track from her album, Red.
Watch Swift perform the four songs in the video below.
