Swift joined NPR’s Tiny Desk – a concert series where artists performs their music in an intimate setting of their choice.
Swift performed her 3 songs from her latest LP “Lover” in a warm and cozy acoustic set up for the show. Her set list included “The Man,” “Lover,” “Death by a Thousand Cuts” and fan-favourite, emotional ballad “All Too Well”. Swift spilled the beans about the making and inspirations behind these hits.
She opened up that the core theme for the track “The Man” had been playing in her head for a very long time. “Over the course of my life, it has occurred to me that we have a bit for double-standard issue in our society,” she said. “It’s something I’ve thought about 700 million times a day for the last 10 years of my life. And I was always wondering, ‘Can I write a song about this? Is there a concise and catchy way to 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 what my life would be like, and what people would say about my life, if I did all the same things — but if I was a man.”
She switches to her title track “Lover”. She said, “There’s a song that I wrote on the album that I knew as soon as I wrote it, it was going to be the title track,” she said about the hit. “Writing songs is strange because it never happens exactly the same way, but sometimes it happens in a way that feels like this weird haunting that you can’t really explain. Like you don’t know where these ideas came from and you feel like you didn’t work at all to write it, and that’s the best kind of song.”
Swift later performed the tracks “Death by a Thousand Cuts” and “All Too Well,” concluding the mini-concert.