(In 2010, I saw Taylor Swift at Prudential and was not amused, in 2013 I returned to the scene of the crime and loved her. Here are both reviews… Even 2013 feels like a lifetime time away now! In 2010, she was pretty big but not the world conqueror we know today… IL)
Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
“We have a lot in common, you and I”, Taylor Swift claimed before launching into”Mean” on her banjo and following it with “Stay Stay Stay”. Perhaps we do, perhaps loving Taylor is an ageless grace in which the daydreamers of the world, and especially the younger female members, join her in a land of love and denial, jealousy, desire and deliverance. Welcome to a Taylor Swift concert.
The Red tour reached the Prudential Center Wednesday night and was immediately the Arena rock concert to beat. After six years of an extended High School Senior Year, the 23 year old superstar is all grown up and she acts grown though but only to the degree where the grown up fails to speak now to the daydreaming girls who make up the majority of her audience. Then she is the 16 year old girl we met all those years ago with tears on her guitar.And it was her job on the current tour to find where the two met. It is a more treacherous game than dumping boy band English pop stars though perhaps not as tough as maintaining your concentration through a fourth album. And at Taylor Swift’s eagerly anticipated early tour set in New Jersey, she performed the balancing act with such skill, the two hour performance became a masterclass on how to conduct your business the right way.
Here are some tricks of the trade, which are like the equivalent of always running to first base though artists from Bruce to Bieber to Madonna seem unable or uncompelled to do so.
1. Have your opening act come on stage early.
2. Then instead of messing around till 9pm, or, in the case of Lady Gaga at the same venue, 10pm, or Madonna 11pm, go on stage at 830pm.
3. Play two hours straight, don’t bother with an encore, and make sure your fans are out in plenty of time to catch the 11pm train to New York Penn Station.
It might seem to be a small thing, such attention to detail so your young audience can make the most of concert experience, but it isn’t. It is largesse, it is good manners. It makes a big difference. When I saw Gaga I had to catch the same train going back to the city and missed half the show.
But it is still just the icing on the cake as Taylor Swift moved through a flawless performance. Every song a perfect jewel, the theatrical performances, remember the wedding in “Speak Now”, kept to a minimum, the piano segment two songs, one, “All Too Well” a passionate recherchez to a lost, a set highlight, the acoustic segment a complete success.
And while she often falls into girlish banter when speaking to the girls in the audience, the revelations when they do arriv are all about craft, about how she does it and why. Taylor calls her songwriting “a coping mechanism” and for a woman who writes in some detail about “her feelings”, it seems like a claim that the method is the message.
This is not the best time I’ve seen Taylor on stage, but it is the best set she has performed and not only because Red is her best album. Fearless and Speak Now peak higher but they are nowhere near as consistent. There isn’t much of a dud on Red. “State Of Grace” is a young adult romantic masterpiece and with a full on rock band (two guitars!) behind her, Taylor smashes through it to start the evening. It is the sort of song one of those indie bands much cooler than her might play only Taylor’s song is better. In the Taylor story, the song isn’t just a magical thumper (the acoustic version works equally well) but it is also a post teen Taylor. The puppy love innocence of “Our Song” is long gone and the travails of teen romance, the “this love is difficult but it is real” is steamed over in sexual passion.
So Taylor starts at the top of her game in a bright, changing, darkening and lightening glare of red lights. The first three songs, while sung along to with alacrity by the teenage girl audience, are the older 22 (er 23) year old Taylor. When she reaches back for her fourth song to “You Belong With Me” gone are the cheerleader outfits and instead the song is rearranged so it mimics the girl group sound of the 1960s,
The first major set piece has Taylor as a Hollywood star being harassed by journalists and paparazzi for “The Lucky One” and it is the only shrugger of the evening. In 2013, the complaints I had about her singing being wobbly in 2009 no longer apply, with no backing tracks that I can hear ,she nailed every song. But in 2013, she still can’t dance and the set pieces are the weak link here. At least she had “Love Story” to act out in 2009. None of the big production numbers except for the last song circus MC “We Are Never Ever Getting Back” were really needed. “22″, as fun a song as you ever want to hear didn’t NEED 10 dancers selling the point to us.
Musically, Taylor is on a mission that included playing electric and acoustic guitar, drums, banjo and piano and only the piano specifically well. She claims to have learnt how to play guitar on a 12 string which would be more believable if there hadn’t been film of her opening a Christmas gift of a six string at the age of nine. Her singing is better than it has ever been, even if a little nondescript, there is a sweetness to her voice and it is right for her songs. And her songs can withstand just about anything. Both the Fearless and Speak Now sets meandered here and there, but Wednesday night everything is full ahead and the songs are given lovely, lively passionate takes.
Some more nitpicking? Here is some more. The fans getto choose a song at every stop and for some insane reason chose “Starlight”. “Starlight”??? All we get is the one, and we chose one from an album she won’t stop playing. How about “Forever and Always”? Cmon, Jersey, is that all you’ve got. The one opportunity to hear “Mine” and we blew it.
But is that the worst you can say? Yeah, more or less. Taylor gave her fans a superbly crafted set. A just about perfect two hours of pop rock with a good band and a minimum of acoustic hi-jinx. She treated her young fans with all the love and respect they deserved while, impossible to overstate this, streamlining the Speak Now esthetics to a fine point, a study in a simple design well executed and the least indulgent, most creative arena rock show anywhere. Everything improved here, “Mean” was perfect, and the extremely accurate warning that there will be bullies throughout all of our lives just made it better, “Love Story” remains possibly the greatest song of the 21st Century, and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is one of the best songs she’s ever written.
And the fans were adorable, dressed up like Taylor’s from her various videos with huge self made signs and glitter in their eyes. Some as young as 8 or 9, mostly teens who probably were 8 and 9 when they first heard of her. What a wonderful place to be, these young girls traveling into adulthood with these great songs about the social conditions they live in to light their way. “Ever”, “Love Story”, “Mean”, “Our Song” –this music will last and last and last. They will never look back with embarrassment. Like the Beatles teenage girl fans before them, these are songs they will carry with them all their lives.
And as for Taylor, I guess she did it, she went from teen sensation to 20 something serial monogamist and she did it with apparent ease and while selling more albums, more tickets, making new fans and maintaining her old ones. Except for her fan club fiasco where they threw away 100s of unopened mail, she doesn’t have a serious blemish on her career and with this tour she has proven once again that it is Taylor’s world we just live in it. And that world is RED!
Grade: A
Thursday May 13th, 2010
At some point late during Taylor Swift’s Fearless Concert at Prudential Center, the young superstar introduces “White Horse” by claiming: “There are two kinds of love stories. Fairy Tales and Life Lessons.” She pauses as though she is a great oracle waiting for her sub-Hallmark nonsense to sink in (no wonder Taylor has a deal to produce greeting cards). “And the difference is Fairy Tales have happy endings.” An even longer pause as the close circuit TV hones in on her face while T-Wizzle moves her eyes from side to side, er, expressively. “And Life Lessons don’t.”
Okie dokie.
Look, nobody turns to Taylor for deep thoughts: we turn to her for deep feelings and deeper melodies. Through two albums of brilliant country pop, one Christmas album, the greatest “Umbrella” cover known to man and the very greatest rap song (with T. Pain), she has provided it. And it carries her through this really awful two hour concert.
The first band, Gloriana, is a country-pop foursome with one hit and a coupla crossovers in the oven. Not bad. Kellie Pickler (TS: “One of my best friends”) is such an American Idol alumni that she scretchys thru her set. EVERYBODY WHO COMES OFF IDOL OVER SINGS. The songs are ok, and the song she wrote with TS, “Rocks Instead Of Rice” a little more, but dressed in black with a fake drawl, a fake country band, and a TS redux sincerity, she fails to connect with anybody. “Best Years Of My Life” wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
Taylor enters dressed as a marching band leader till she takes off her tall hat and lets her long tresses come rolling down way past her shoulders and the young audience howls in pleasure.
The young audience sings along as well and provide the uplift for Taylor Swifts academic march through
1) the hits
2) self help
3) The singing
4) Love of Taylor.
The Hits
There are plenty and pacing is almost irrelevant as there is much stuff to choose for. She opens with “You Belong With Me”-a crowd pleaser and a me pleaser, as Taylor and a coupla thousand girls throw their hearts at a boys feet. You can’t fake this song, it cuts so deep and don’t tell me it is all just puppy love. Puppy love isn’t silly to puppies. It’s a great song, a potboiler “life lesson” and easily emapthized by just about everybody who went to high School of either sex. The version played tonight is too loud and too boring and overacted and overearnest. Not bad enough to destroy an indestructible song which is the whole moral here.
She coulda sung “Love Story” -the swiftly uptempo masterpiece -the first time I heard the song knocking on two years ago (before Fearless was released) I nearly fell out of my chair. It is crescendo building segue from verse to chorus back to verse. A three part restructuring of “Romeo And Juliet” into a joyful last act of love (she plays it near the end though at this point she can put the songs wherever she wants to). Joe Steinhardt coulda written “take me somewhere we can be alone, i’ll be waiting all there’s left to do is run” and the end is so exulted, so triumphant, Springsteen could stick his name to it if he was a teen girl. I am going on at length because from the 18th century full Elizabethan garb with taped orchestra thru to Swift tearing off one dress to reveal a wedding dress, the version here was just a drag. With a song this good let the fucking song construction do the work for you. It needed nothing but to be played sincerely, and sung and played well. Something Taylor doesn’t do once tonight.
From time to time she comes close, “Fearless” isn’t terrible and the first encore “Today Was A Fairytale” was quite good though, like everything else here, there isn’t a spontaneous second. I just took a look at a setlist from a May 2009 concert in as Vegas. The entire difference in the set list? She did’t have “Fairy Tale” yet so played a different song in that position. Cmon, girl, you’re 20 years old… shake the sucker up already. The music was DOA.
