Taylor Swift is taking fan requests to heart this tour, sprinkling rare songs from her collection into the acoustic portion of her Reputation Stadium Tour set. Her surprise song choice at her latest concert, where she acknowledged that longtime fans want to hear old songs, was particularly touching.
Saturday (Sept. 1) in Minneapolis, Minn., Swift played country balled “Tied Together With a Smile,” a song from her 2006 self-titled, debut album that probably hasn’t seen her stage for a good 10 years.
“Hold on, baby, you’re losing it/ The water’s high, you’re jumping into it/ And letting go, and no one knows/ That you cry, but you don’t tell anyone/ That you might not be the golden one/ And you’re tied together with a smile/ But you’re coming undone,” Swift sings on the poignant track that she once told a journalist she wrote “about one of my friends, who is this beauty queen, pageant princess — a gorgeous, popular girl in high school. Every guy wanted to be with her, every girl wanted to be her. I wrote that song the day I found out she had an eating disorder.”
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But before Swift began to play “Tied Together With a Smile” Saturday night, she shared some meaningful advice with her fans, reminding those in the crowd that they’re not alone in whatever struggles they may encounter in their lives.
“One thing I have noticed in my life is you can never judge what somebody else is going through, even if they seem like they have it all together, they seem like, how can they ever have any problems?” she said on one of the B-stages at U.S. Bank Stadium. “Somebody is maybe really beautiful or seems like they have it all together, maybe they have a life that you’re really envious of.”
“But I’ve learned that appearances aren’t everything,” Swift added. “Just because somebody looks happy doesn’t mean they are. Just because somebody looks healthy doesn’t mean they are.”
She continued: “There’s so much pressure on everyone these days to have it all together, to have a perfect body, a perfect life, to know exactly where they want to go with their life. I think the stress and the pressure of not being able to say that they’re hurting has really taken a toll on a lot of people. So I’m just asking you, just try to be kind to yourself. Just know that there are so many people that are going through the exact same thing that you might be going through, whatever it is.”
Hear Swift’s 2018 performance of “Tied Together With a Smile” and her speech in the fan-filmed clips below.