Taylor Swift’s performance on Saturday marked her third and final Eras Tour show at Liverpool, England’s Anfield stadium, and she treated the audience to a double live debut of songs to mark the occasion.
As fan footage showcases, she first premiered “Carolina” live during the surprise section of her set. The 2022 song from the soundtrack of Where the Crawdads Sing was part of a mashup with Evermore’s “No Body, No Crime.” Before launching into the songs, she said, “I’m going to call this the Murder Mashup.”
Taking to the piano for the second surprise song, she performed her live debut of The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology’s “The Manuscript” in a mashup with “Red,” the title track of her fourth studio album from 2012.
During Friday’s show, Swift played Calvin Harris with Rihanna’s “This Is What You Came For” which Swift co-wrote with Harris, whom she was dating around the time the song was released in 2016. She is credited for the song under the pseudonym Nils Sjöberg, as she explained to Paul McCartney in a Musicians on Musicians interview for Rolling Stone in 2020.
“I wrote under the name Nils Sjöberg because those are two of the most popular names of Swedish males. I wrote this song called ‘This Is What You Came For’ that Rihanna ended up singing,” she said at the time. “And nobody knew for a while. I remembered always hearing that when Prince wrote ‘Manic Monday,’ they didn’t reveal it for a couple of months.”
Swift has been debuting a number of songs live during her European and U.K. leg of the Eras Tour, including “The Bolter” and “Crazier” while in Edinburgh, Scotland; “The Tortured Poets Department” and “Fresh Out the Slammer” in Lisbon; and “How Did It End?” in Stockholm, Sweden.
Swift has also confirmed that she will be wrapping the Eras Tour for good at the end of 2024. “A lot of you are like, ‘How are you going to celebrate the 100th show?’ And for me, the celebration of the 100th show for me means this is the very first time I’ve ever acknowledged to myself and admitted that this tour is going to end in December, like that’s it,” Swift told the audience at Thursday’s Liverpool show. “And that feels like so far away from now, but then again, it feels like we just played our first show on this tour, because you have made this so much fun for us.”
This week, the singer heads to Cardiff, Wales on Tuesday and then the tour hits London next weekend, where Swift will perform three nights at Wembley Stadium. Her U.K. and European dates run through August, before she wraps her Eras Tour shows in Canada with a string of dates in Toronto in November and Vancouver in December.
Anthony Orosz*