Taylor Swift added a hilarious ad lib during the acoustic portion of her Thursday, July 18, Eras Tour show in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.
Swift, 34, performed a mashup of “Speak Now” and “Hey Stephen” on guitar as her first surprise song of the evening. After singing the “Hey Stephen” bridge lyric, “All those other girls, well, they’re beautiful, but would they write a song for you?” the pop star cheekily said, “Nope!” The crowd cheered in delight after hearing Swift’s playful addition to the Fearless song.
Swift also expressed gratitude for the audience’s warm response to the titular track of her 2010 album, Speak Now.
“Oh, my God, you guys know that whole song,” she said. “Thank you so much. Just proves that you’ve been supportive for over a decade.” The songwriter then moved to the piano to perform a mashup of Folklore’s “This Is Me Trying” and Midnights’ “Labyrinth.”
Since the Eras Tour began in March 2023, Swift has performed two surprise acoustic songs at every show. She’s made it through an impressive portion of her catalog, but there are still some songs she’s never played, including The Tortured Poets Department’s “So Long, London” and Lover’s “London Boy,” both of which are heavily speculated to be about her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn.
There are some songs from Swift’s discography that she’s unlikely to ever play as surprise songs, such as the Lover song “Soon You’ll Get Better,” which is about her parents’ cancer diagnoses.
“It was hard to write. It’s hard to sing. It’s hard to listen to, for me,” Swift told Billboard of the tune in August 2019.
While it’s hard to remember life before the Eras Tour boosted local economies and made friendship bracelets cool again, it will, in fact, come to an end later this year. At her 100th Eras Tour performance in Liverpool, England, last month, Swift confirmed that the December 8 show in Vancouver will be the last.
“People have been like, ‘How are you going to celebrate the 100th show?’ The celebration of the 100th show for me means this is the very first time I’ve acknowledged to myself and admitted that this tour is going to end in December,” she told the crowd. “Like, that’s it.”
Swift went on to call the tour “the most exhausting, all-encompassing, but most joyful, most rewarding, most wonderful” experience of her life.
“I think that this tour has really become my entire life,” she continued. “It’s taken over everything. I think I once had hobbies, but I don’t know what they were anymore. All I do when I’m not on stage is sit at home and try to think of clever acoustic song mash-ups and think about what you might want to hear.”
