“All the quirks you’ve spent years trying to hide, they are actually your superpowers; they’re what set you apart. They don’t make you better. They don’t make you worse. They make you you, and only you can be that.”
"Welcome to the acoustic part of the evening, ladies and gentlemen! Guys and gals and nonbinary pals, everyone here, welcome to the acoustic set! So one thing I always just want to mention to you is that I will never be able to thank you enough for what you’ve done for me in terms of, I’ve been re-recording my first six albums, I don’t know if you know about this? Yeah, it’s been something that’s really, really important to me, and ever since I was a teenager and I started putting out my albums, I knew that my long-term goal was to one day own my art, my work, my music. That’s just always been something I’ve really wanted and dreamed about. And so a couple of years ago, I announced that I was going to be re-recording and re-releasing my entire first six albums, and I’ve put out two of them, and you’ve been unbelievably, supportive is too small a word. It’s just been beyond that. It’s been unbelievable to me, unfathomable really, I’m completely blown away by what you have done for me, because you didn’t have to do it, right? This is a passion project. This is something that I wanted to do personally, because I wanted to own my work, but I went into it knowing that I wasn’t going to put an expectation, or a demand on you guys to like, pick my versions, like my versions of the songs better, but that’s what you did, and it was fantastic and you’ve been amazing. So I want to talk to you a little bit about something I’m really excited about. 13 days from now, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) is out. So I want to talk to you a little bit about this because Speak Now is an album that is so incredibly important to me. This was an album that I wrote between the ages of 18 and 20, and I wrote it completely alone without any collaborators in the co-writing department, and it was something that I wanted to do, I think to prove to myself, and I ended up writing a really, really intense, magical album that I cannot believe gets to come out in a form that I will own, and be able to call mine in 13 days. So you know, with that said, I get to stand on this stage every single night of this tour and watch the most beautiful things happen. I watch you guys make friends with each other, I watch you bond, I watch you give each other friendship bracelets, it’s like, I see so many beautiful interactions happen, and I hear so many stories about friends that were made at these shows, and I watch it happen every night. It’s the most unbelievable thing to watch. And so I was hoping to ask you that as we lead up to this album coming out, I would love for that kindness and that gentleness to extend onto our internet activities, right? So, what I’m trying to say is, I am putting this album out, because I want to own my music, and I believe that any artist who has the desire to own their music should be able to. That’s why I’m putting out this album. I’m 33 years old. I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19, except the songs I wrote and the memories we made together. So what I’m trying to tell you is I am not putting this album out so that you can go out and should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written a song about 14 billion years ago. I do not care. We have all grown up. We’re good. So I am saying that because, only because I am proud of it as a song, I am going to play Dear John."
— Taylor before singing Dear John (guitar) in Minneapolis, MN on June 24th
"And so we have brought the folklore cabin to Minneapolis! So the folklore cabin, it was something that pretty much only existed in my imagination, because basically, like, you know, we all had our coping mechanisms and our escape hatches during the pandemic—you know what yours are, I know what mine are—one of mine was folklore! Making folklore, and creating this world that wasn’t the reality I was living in, but it seemed like a great place to be. It was like a fantasy, right? I just imagined myself as you know, instead of being like a lonely millennial woman surviving on television and white wine, I was like a pioneer woman. I was a Victorian lady wandering through the forest and like, you know, writing poetry with a feather quill on a piece of parchment paper. It was all, like my imaginary world during the pandemic, was just exactly what folklore seems like. So I kind of just imagined I lived in this cabin, and then so when I wanted to make music videos and stuff, and do the art for the album, I definitely leaned into like, exactly what I had pictured in my imagination. But another thing I did during the making of this album was I kind of made a decision that I was going to choose to take a step back from being so excruciatingly autobiographical with my writing, just for a minute, you know? Just take a second to be like—cause guys, you know, when you’re writing about your life, in detail, from the time you’re like, I don’t know, 12 years old, and those songs all end up going out into the world, you’re like, I mean, that’s a problem of my own creation, I understand, but it can get pretty intense when you have an album release. But for folklore, I was like, ‘What if we took a more fictional take on this? And I could create characters, and character arcs, and they could interact with each other?’ And I would obviously infuse my feelings into them, but I just thought that would be so fun. And it was, it was really fun. I’m glad you agree, I’m so glad, that works out perfectly. So there were these characters that I created that have a teenage love triangle situation going on. I mean, you know about this, good! So there’s this character I created named James, this teenage boy who really, really, really screws things up with the love of his life, and he has to try to get her back, and he has to try to apologize really sincerely, and well, I mean, long story short, her name is Betty."
— Taylor before singing betty in Minneapolis, MN on June 24th
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