Taylor Swift’s Stripped-Back ‘Tiny Desk Concert’ Will Make Your Day
"[This is] an opportunity to show you how the songs sounded when I first wrote them.”
It’s been yet another huge year for NPR‘s Tiny Desk Concert, one of the more unique performance formats in the world — and now, they’ve even got Taylor Swift to perform a stripped-back set for easily the smallest crowd she’s performed for in a long, long time.
2019 has seen everyone from the Jonas Brothers to Lizzo and the cast of Sesame Street perform a stripped-back, unplugged set of songs in the space. For the first time, this week Swift popped in to perform four songs to a captive room of some 300 NPR staffers. Those are small numbers for Swift, but it’s the biggest turnout for a Tiny Desk Concert since the Pixies performed there back in 2014.
Swift primarily lifted from Lover, which you’ve no doubt listened to and read about exhaustively by this point. She performs ‘The Man’, ‘Lover’ and ‘Death By A Thousand Cuts’, saying she viewed Tiny Desk as “an opportunity to show you guys how the songs sounded when I first wrote them.”
In their acoustic guise, away from the bells and whistles of the production board, it’s fascinating to hear how Swift claims these songs were created initially – in certain instances, they’re almost different songs entirely. It carries no air of pretension, especially when Swift goes into extensive detail surrounding the writing and creation of each song.
As a bonus cut, Swift threw in a performance of ‘All Too Well,’ which was recently placed 57th on Pitchfork’s 200 Best Songs of the 2010s and is experiencing somewhat of a renaissance. If you’re wondering how the biggest pop star in the world fares with no dancers, no pyro and no costume changes, then switch your attention this way for the next half-hour.
You can watch the entire performance on NPR’s website here.