Taylor Swift debuts The National collaboration ‘coney island’ live on ‘Eras’ tour

29 April, 2023

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift paid tribute to The National by playing ‘coney island’, on which they guested, for the first time on the latest stop of her ‘Eras’ tour.

The song, taken from her 2020 album ‘evermore’ was played along with ‘The Other Side Of The Door’ from ‘Fearless’ as part of the “surprise song” segment of the show, which made a stop last night (April 28) in Atlanta, Georgia. Swift is set to play two further shows there tonight and tomorrow (April 29-30).

Before playing the song, Swift took a moment to shout out the Aaron Dessner-fronted band on the day that their new album, ‘First Two Pages Of Frankenstein’, was released.

“This band has influenced me beyond my ability to verbalize how much they’ve influenced me — just lyrically, their ability to set a scene, their ability to tell a story,” Swift said. “And obviously, Aaron Dessner is in the National and he has completely changed my life.”

She continued: “I was lucky enough to be able to write a song with them for their new album. Check it out, stream it, buy it on vinyl. I love them so much. They’ve been so kind to me.”

She then introduced ‘coney island’ after warning that she wasn’t about to sing ‘The Alcott’, the song from ‘First Two Pages Of Frankenstein’ that she appears on.

The National then shared footage of Swift’s speech onto their social media, which Dessner retweeted with the caption “thank you!!!”

Dessner produced ‘evermore’ and recently revealed that two of the pop star’s songs — ‘Willow’ and ‘Cardigan’ — were initially meant to be released by them.

“I’d taken a swing at [‘Cardigan’] and ‘Willow’ and a couple of others, and I wasn’t having a lot of luck, so Aaron sent them to Taylor,” Matt Berninger recalled to The Telegraph. “The reverse has happened, too, where Aaron wrote something for Taylor, and I dove right in. It works both ways.”

Earlier this month, Dessner also joined Swift onstage in Tampa, Florida during her ongoing ‘Eras’ tour. Here, the pair duetted on two songs: ‘The Great War’ (a track he produced for the ‘3am Edition’ of ‘Midnights’) and ‘Mad Woman’ from her ‘Folklore’ album.

Discussing his time onstage with Swift, Dessner told NME that the gig was “the greatest show I’ve ever seen”. “It’s just insane. The scale of the tour. And the music, the visual design, the choreography and her musicianship, it’s on a level that I’ve never seen anything like,” he said.

“To me, it’s something to aspire to: to be that ambitious with her music. I think sometimes people ask me questions about working with pop stars like it’s not an honour, but it’s a total honour. I learned way more from her than she’s learned with us.”

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