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Live Review: Taylor Swift at the Frank Erwin Center
Taylor Swift spent Wednesday night preaching to the choir and man alive, was that choir ready to scream back.
Her core audience is women and girls, some of them very young — in other words, folks who dream of high school, are in high school or remember high school.
They adore her and Swift knows it. When she wasn’t singing, playing guitar (solo and acoustic on “Fifteen”) or bounding around on stage, she spent a good long time standing there with that “Who, lil’ ol’ me?” smile/stare on her face, absorbing screams and applause. Who knows if it was an ego boost or just a time-killer between set changes? The choir was only too willing to oblige.
With a high school setting on the curved screens that made up her stage set, Swift was preceded by male and female cheerleaders, bounding out and flipping around as the opening bars of “You Belong With Me,” Swift rose to the top of the stage dressing a marching band uniform, complete with those large, royal-order-of-the-moose-lodge hat marching bands wear.
This, of course, set up the dynamic. She is the outsider, the band geek who can never get the dream boy. So she writes a song about it, a song that anyone can relate to.
Tunes like “Our Song,” “Tell Me Why,” “Teardrops on my guitar” and “Fearless” mixed detailed emotions with spot on playing from her band and myriad costume changes.
Speaking of flipping, boy, can that gal flip her hair. Admittedly, it’s spectacular hair and she worked it, her head seemingly capable of 360 degree motion — I counted ten different angles in a four bar passage during the piano ballad “You’re Not Sorry” point. Somewhere, her chiropractor is already putting money down on a beach house.
Speaking of not being sorry, she may want to start thinking about writing about something other than guys that have wronged her. Sure, it’s made her a millionaire with a roaring fanbase, 10 million albums sold and a shelf full of awards, but it’s starting to get slightly…disconcerting.
Before “Forever & Always”, a song allegedly inspire by her breakup with Joe Jonas, she played a clip of an interview with “Today” show host Hoda Kotb, in which she says essentially that guys who she dates who don’t want to be written about, well, “They shouldn’t do bad things.” This phrase then pulses all over the set for the entirety of the song. At 20, she is about a year away from stuff like that losing all it’s charm entirely.
Then again, she stretched out “Hey Stephen” well past the ten minute mark by starting it from way deep in the crowd, singing a bit, then moving down the stairs hugging people, slapping five, more hugging, etc.
She keeps that up, the choir will let her do whatever she likes. They belong to her and she belongs to them.
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