It’s been more than a month since Taylor Swift exchanged vows with Travis Kelce in Madison Square Garden, and now both are getting back to work.
With Kelce gearing up for the upcoming NFL season, Swift is likewise back on the job, and last week took to the stage for her first performance since tying the knot.
The intimate performance, accompanied by a Q&A for a small audience about about 100, took place at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles during an exclusive, invitation-only event on Tuesday, August 18.
The Icon Sessions
Titled The Icon Sessions with Taylor Swift: A 20-Year Retrospective, the exclusive event was held for the Recording Academy Songwriters & Composers Wing at the museum.
The nearly 50-minute appearance began with a Q&A, with Swift interviewed by Recording Academy president Harvey Mason Jr. That was followed by a performance as Swift delivered a brief three-song medley while accompanying herself on her now-iconic flower-painted piano.
In her first public performance the wedding, Swift’s musical mashup began with “I Knew It, I Knew You,” which she wrote for the “Toy Story 5” soundtrack.
She then segued into “folkore” hit “August,” which then merged into “All Too Well” from the “Red” album.
‘I Knew It, I Knew You’
During the pre-performance interview with Mason, Swift explained that writing in the third person for “folklore” prepared her for “I Knew It, I Knew You.”
“Oh, it was extremely different for me,” Swift shared.
“Sort of a like a pressure release valve. It was it was an escape into my imagination. It was all of a sudden I was walking on a a cliffside and looking at the ocean instead of just being at home,” she continued
“And and it was it it was lot of things all at once,” Swift added. “But with ‘folklore’ I was oftentimes creating the character and creating different characters who were interacting with each other and that was really fun. I just got to write in character for ‘Toy Story 5’ which was such a blast.”
Creating a song for movie focusing on cowgirl Jesse, she added, was especially poignant for her, given that Jesse is a character she’s loved for “years and years and years.”
‘Playing For the Fans’
When Mason asked Swift how she came to begin trusting her instincts when sharing her deeply personal songs with the world, she referenced the intense connection she has with Swifties.
“I’m making music because I’m playing for the fans,” she explained.
“I’m putting this out for people who care about it and who look to music as a way to cope with their life in the way that I did; I think that if you can actually go through all those checkpoints, you realize that putting out music you’ve made that you love so much is not the path to universal validation,” Swift added. “If you’re still doing it, then you love it for the right reasons.”
Meanwhile, the public scrutiny that her songs face “sometimes fuels [her songwriting]. Sometimes when people are mocking me, it’s really fun to mock them back. Sometimes I like to just use words that they have to look up in order to talk [expletive] about.”
Whenever she feels discouraged, she pointed to the “coping mechanisms” she utilizes, noting that “one of them is saying, ‘You chose this. You chose this every day. You could have opted out of this any day before it got unmanageably big,’ and I decided not to because I love it that much. And that’s just where it begins and where it ends. Everything that comes with this ultimately is worth it, as long as I get to still make music.”
