How Taylor Swift Plans Her Acoustic Mash-Ups

Over the course of her critically acclaimed Eras Tour, Taylor Swift has kept fans on their toes. Though the tour has gone on for nearly two years, the “Fortnight” hitmaker has kept the surprises coming each night, most recently with her mash-up songs during the acoustic portion of the show.

For the mash-up performances, Swift usually chooses two songs from her catalog with similar compositional structures and performs them in tandem. This came after Swift had ran through a good portion of the “surprise songs” in her discography.

Since the Eras Tour kicked off in March 2023, Swift performed a “surprise song” at each show — one song from her collection of albums which would be different for every concert date. However, once the shows began to outnumber the songs, Swift decided to switch it up. 

“The acoustic section has gone through many iterations and rules,” Swift wrote in her Eras Tour Book, which was published on Friday, November 29. “At the start of the U.S. tour, I decided I was going to challenge myself to only play a song one time, pushing myself to play as many songs as possible.”

The Grammy winner also noted that fans ardently kept track of the surprise songs over the course of her worldwide trek.

“[O]nce I’d played pretty much every song I’d ever released, I announced that all of my songs were fair game again,” Swift wrote.

During the final leg of the tour, Swift began mashing up her songs, choosing the cuts “that go together thematically or rhythmically.” Some of these mashups included “White Horse” from her 2008 album Fearless paired with “Coney Island” from her 2020 album Evermore, “I Don’t Want to Live Forever” from the 50 Shades Darker soundtrack mashed with “Dress” from her 2017 album Reputation, and “I Think He Knows” from 2019’s Lover and “Gorgeous” from Reputation.

“By the end of the tour, I was playing between four [and] five mashed-up songs in a night in the acoustic set,” she said. “It takes a lot of rehearsing to get the mash-ups just right, but when the crowd screams like crazy when I transition, it’s beyond worth the prep time involved.”

Swift will wrap the Eras Tour this weekend with three shows in Vancouver on December 6, 7, and 8.

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