Taylor Swift Gives ‘This Is What You Came For’ Its Eras Tour Debut: ‘A Little Bit Unexpected’
Taylor Swift might have been understating things when she called one of her surprise songs for night 2 in Liverpool, England, “a little bit unexpected.”
Making its Eras Tour debut on Friday night (June 14), Swift performed “This Is What You Came For” — the Billboard Hot 100 top five hit released by Calvin Harris and Rihanna in 2016, which Harris co-wrote with his then-girlfriend Swift — in a mash-up with Evermore‘s “gold rush” for the first of two surprise acoustic songs.
With a guitar slung over her cobalt-blue ombre maxi dress, Swift introduced the song by acknowledging that it might be an especially surprising surprise song. “Every single time that we have an acoustic set, I’m always trying to think of things that you might want to hear, maybe things that might be a little bit expected,” she told the Anfield Stadium crowd. “Let’s see how we did tonight.”
While “This Is What You Came For” was making its Eras Tour debut, Swift has performed the song twice before: once in 2016 at her Formula 1 U.S. Grand Prix concert in Austin, Texas, and once in 2017 at her Super Saturday Night concert in Houston, Texas, ahead of that year’s Super Bowl.
When the song was released in April 2016, it was credited as being co-written by Harris and an unknown songwriter named “Nils Sjöberg.” Following Harris and Swift’s breakup, TMZ reported in July of the same year that Sjöberg was actually a pen name for the pop singer/songwriter, and Harris confirmed her involvement on Twitter. In a 2020 Rolling Stone conversation with Paul McCartney, Swift explained her motivation for using the pen name.
“I think, when a pseudonym comes in is when you still have a love for making the work and you don’t want the work to become overshadowed by this thing that’s been built around you, based on what people know about you,” Swift said at the time. “And that’s when it’s really fun to create fake names and write under them. I wrote under the name Nils Sjöberg because those are two of the most popular names of Swedish males. I wrote this song called ‘This Is What You Came For’ that Rihanna ended up singing. And nobody knew for a while. I remembered always hearing that when Prince wrote ‘Manic Monday’ [for The Bangles], they didn’t reveal it for a couple of months.”
For her second acoustic song on Friday night, Swift performed a Midnights mash-up of “The Great War” and “You’re Losing Me” on piano.
Watch Swift perform “This Is What You Came For” in Liverpool:
Katie Atkinson
Billboard
