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18 things we learned from Taylor Swift's '1989 World Tour' documentary

Taylor Swift’s giddy cries of “Please welcome to the stage…” are still ringing in our ears, but the time has come: After 85 shows and seemingly endless special guests, the 1989 World Tour is finally over.

It won’t soon be forgotten, though, in part because The 1989 World Tour (Live) documentary is now available to stream on Apple Music, giving broke Swifties who didn’t attend the tour a chance to experience the magic. But even if you did catch the tail of this comet, you still might learn something new from the documentary, which intersperses full, sparkling, neon-tinged footage from Swift’s Sydney, Australia stop with commentary from the star, and clips from other cities’ shows.

For those who don’t have Apple Music (or the 2 hours and 11 minutes required to watch the full documentary), here are 18 things we learned from The 1989 World Tour (Live) , in no particular order:

1. “Blank Space” is Swift’s favorite moment of every show

She loves playing the seductive serial dater who becomes obsessed with her boyfriends and then goes crazy. “When I wrote ‘Blank Space,’ I just thought, all right, if [the media] want[s] me to play this character … this whole image of the jet-setting, tragic mess, cool,” Swift said. “I’ll write a song from that perspective and see how you like it.” As we’ve known since 1989 came out in 2014, the song hit its mark: “It ended up being the biggest song I’ve ever had,” she said.

2. She didn’t bring special guests on stage just to brag about her squad — it was essentially a tactic to combat spoilers and keep an element of surprise every night

“Every person in the audience probably knows what costumes I’m going to wear,” Swift explained. “They could know the set list if they really wanted to, so I decided to start inviting special guests out.”

3. The remixed version of “I Knew You Were Trouble” she played on tour was phenomenal.

Okay, this is a personal opinion, but watching this funky, piano-heavy version of “Trouble” really might make you wish you’d gotten tickets to this tour, if you missed it. At least we have it on video …

4. She has Mick Jagger’s cell phone number (and uses it)

When Swift was on a hike in Nashville before that city’s concert, her dad called her. “I pick up the phone and Dad’s like, ‘My friend swears he was sitting next to Mick Jagger at lunch yesterday,’ ” Swift said. “So I text Mick, and I said, ‘Hey, are you in town? I’m playing a show tomorrow. Do you want to come out and sing “Satisfaction?””‘ He just writes back, ‘What will I wear?’ “

(We’re going to start slipping that line into every story from now on. “So I text Mick …”)

5. Losing the 2014 Grammy for Album of the Year to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories inspired her to write 1989

“I ended up going home thinking a lot about everything,” Swift said of that 2014 evening. “[I was] thinking about where I was going, what I’d been doing. … I needed to change something. I went to bed, and I woke up at 4 in the morning and I knew what the next album needed to be: ‘I need to completely switch gears, it needs to be called 1989 … everything has to be different.’ “

6. Swift is the one who suggested Alanis Morissette “slap” her in the face while the two performed the line, “It was a slap in the face / How quickly I was replaced”

Her rationale? “Bruises heal, but the moment lasts forever.”

7. She pulled out all the stops for her special guests — including changing the color of the audience.

“We can program the bracelets to be absolutely any color,” Swift said. “So the first thing I ask them is, ‘What color do you want the audience to be?’ ” She’d be a great concierge in Panem’s Capitol, right? “Pyro is another option we provided for many of the guests,” she said.

8. She loves huggging Wiz Khalifa

“At the end of our performance, there was a hug that lasted for like four years,” Swift said. “I remember thinking, ‘I just don’t want this hug to end!’ “

9. Swift used beach towels and nail polish to explain the tour’s runway to her model friends

And Karlie Kloss secretly filmed the whole thing — including the excitement backstage.

10. Swift calls professional athletes “sports players”

“If an actor or a sports player wanted to come to the show, I’d invite them up on stage, because why not?” she said.

11. Her band can learn a song in less than an hour

And, given the fact that most of Swift’s artist guests got to perform their own songs with her, that’s a lot of different genres Swift’s band had to perfect. Kudos to them.

12. Justin Timberlake was slightly worried about the pyrotechnics

“Don’t you burn me, Taylor,” he warned.

13. Also, Swift thinks Timberlake is “our generation’s Frank Sinatra”

Hey, he does have blue eyes!

14. John Legend’s appearance happened at the very last minute

“John Legend happened to be coming to the concert just to watch it,” Swift said, “but in my head I’m like, ‘I know this show starts in 40 minutes, but I want John Legend to sing.’ ” And he did.

15. It was Swift’s idea for Miranda Lambert to emerge atop “a throne made of men”

“I was half expecting her to be like, ‘I’m not doing that,’ ” Swift said, “but she was so down.” Uh, yeah.

16. Swift got to be the sixth member of Fifth Harmony — just for a night

She had the girls teach her the choreography to “Worth It” in their dressing room, then borrowed one of Camila Cabello’s extra costumes to perform the song with the group onstage. “Camila says, ‘I have an extra costume. Do you want to dress like one of us?’ ” Swift said. “And I said, ‘Obviously.’ “

17. Mary J. Blige’s song “Doubt” really speaks to Swift

“It really hit me because I’m so doubtful of myself constantly,” Swift confessed. “No matter what I achieve … That song really struck a chord with me, and I remember thinking it would be amazing if I could ever sing that with her.” Reader, she did.

18. The end of the 1989 World Tour was extra emotional for Swift and her team because they hadn’t gotten sick of it yet

“We didn’t drag it out,” she said. “We didn’t wait til we got sick of it. We’re still in love with it.” And so, it seems, are we.

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Taylor Swift’s Epic ‘1989’ Tour: Every Night With Us Is Like a Dream

By Rob Sheffield

Rob Sheffield

Welcome to New York! Ish! Taylor Swift brought it all back home last night, or at least to New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, for her 1989 Tour. Never one to do things halfway, Swift has made this a pop show — or rather the pop show, as far as 2015 is concerned. The whole night was a two-hour pop-blitz spectacle, where the songs retain all the teardrops-on-my-guitar intimacy of her early days, except blown up into massive electro-warrior emotional avalanches pushing the can’t-even-ometer into the red. This show had it all: life lessons (“You are not the opinion of someone who doesn’t know you!”), synth-disco raves, acoustic ballads, explosions, video interviews with her cats, sparkle-intensive costume changes, a Weeknd duet and oh yeah, the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team parading through the crowd to “Style” in front of 60,000 screaming fans. That kind of night.

When Bruce Springsteen plays NYC, he likes to joke about how the city’s beloved hometown icons — Sinatra, the Statue of Liberty, the sports teams — are rooted in Jersey. There was an element of that when Swift kicked off with her new theme song “Welcome to New York,” explaining, “Although we’re in New Jersey, our story opens in New York.” But these songs aren’t really about any particular city any more than they’re about any particular boy — they all take place in the galaxy Taylor creates in her songs, one where everything orbits around one girl’s mood swings, where boys are disposable and cats are keepers, where girlfriends matter and lying about your feelings is not how things are done around here. (A handwritten sign taped to a door backstage: “Cats Roaming. Do Not Open.” Only on Planet Tay.) It was the kind of show that could only make emotional sense in a stadium this size.

As always, the hardcore fans were a crucial part of the spectacle, in full gear with their costumes and glowsticks. The crowd was, as Taylor said, “jumping and dancing and loud and lit up and dressed up.” There was a gang of girls with their birthdates bedazzled on their shirts a la the 1989 logo—2004, 2007, etc—while their moms proudly repped 1976. Two girls with matching lightboards, one saying WE’RE TOO BUSY DANCING and the other TO GET KNOCKED OFF OUR FEET. A couple of girls with homemade Mean Girls -style shirts announcing, “You Can’t Swift With Us.” The fan faves were probably the girls carrying giant Starbucks venti cups as big as they were, with the logo tweaked to STARBUCKS LOVERS and Taylor’s face in the middle. That’s how a Swift show works: You love the players and you love the game.

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“We all have different insecurities, different fears, different scars,” Taylor announced. “There are many different types of people here tonight. But we have one thing in common: When we feel great amounts of joy or great amounts of pain, we turn to music, and that’s why we’re here tonight.” The show was a marathon—19 songs, stretching almost to midnight. The new songs, despite their studio sheen, really kick live—especially synth-pop epiphanies like “New Romantics” (where Taylor’s male harem of private dancers toted her around on a park bench) and “Blank Space.” She rocked a glow-in-the-dark polka-dot ensemble for “How You Get The Girl,” as her dancing boys twirled neon umbrellas and her band staged an extremely welcome twin-guitar duel. She picked up her trusty acoustic guitar for “Can’t Feel My Face” with the Weeknd, whose hair might have been the most truly 1989 thing in sight.

She radically revised the oldies, which did not stop anyone from singing them. “I Knew You Were Trouble” began with a slow creepy goth-industrial intro — loads of the Sisters of Mercy’s Andrew Eldritch in her vocals! Floodland , holla! — before the drums kicked in and turned it into a rock-me-Amadeus stomp. “Love Story” became a synth ballad, as she whisked around the stadium on her magic levitating catwalk. Even better was the hair-metal version of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” which has never-ever-ever sounded this nasty–Taylor in leather at the lip of the stage, doing a perfect version of the Slash guitar slouch, shoulders hunched, hair falling over face. Who knows, maybe Tay will do an full-on Headbanger’s Ball album next time.

The Reinvention of Taylor Swift

The taylor swift guide to 1989: breakers gonna break, fakers gonna fake, taylor swift: the music that made me.

And because she’s Taylor, she talked the talk. You have never heard a pop star say “Let me clarify that statement” more times in one night. It got heavy, like when she confessed, “Real talk, Jersey: I haven’t always felt like I have real friends, or any friends at all.” She gave the crowd her list of friendship requirements (“You have to like me” and “you have to want to spend time with me,” with various codicils and subclauses). She also told us, “If I had my way, everything would be simple for all of you. I wish nobody would ever mess with your mind. I wish nobody would wait two days to text you back, when you know they had their phone with them the whole time!” That line got one of the biggest roars of the night.

But the hugest moment had to be “Style,” when she brought out the U.S. soccer team, just a few hours after their ticker-tape victory parade. They looked like they were having a blast, strutting down the catwalk, waving giant flags. (After the show they gave her a SWIFT #13 team jersey.) She also brought out Project Runway host Heidi Klum, who if memory serves is from one of the countries the U.S. team aufed in the tournament. (Let the healing begin!) Tay’s been preaching the girl-bonding gospel so long, it’s easy to take that part of her game for granted — but that’s just a measure of how much she’s changed the pop-star landscape. For “Bad Blood,” she struck a pose with video comrades Hailee Steinfeld, Lily Aldridge, Gigi Hadid and Lena Dunham — she shows off her girlfriend collection the way rock bands like Guns N Roses or Great White used to make videos where the girlfriends lounge around the soundstage.

(And speaking of Taylor girlfriends, a sincere question: have Haim always been this good? I wasn’t a fan going in but their opening set was fire, roughing up their pop hits and doing a fantastic version of “Oh Well,” by the Peter Green edition of Fleetwood Mac, which sounds sounds so snotty as a sullen-teen-girl anthem — “Don’t ask me what I think of you / I might not give the answer that you waaant me toooo.” Somewhere, Peter Green must be proud these black magic women have given this song a new life.)

As usual for a Swift show, the quiet moments were some of the most intense, especially “Clean,” “This Love” and the piano medley of “Enchanted” and “Wildest Dreams,” where she whipped out the piano-hair windmills. One of the highlights was “You Are In Love”—not just a deep cut, but a bonus track—where she led the whole crowd in a sing-along. Funny how all the state-of-the-art special effects can’t hold a glowstick to the visceral power of 60,000 fans singing about love pains.

It all ended with “Shake It Off,” with fireworks, confetti and dancing boys in purple Angus Young schoolboy outfits. All night, the Eighties concept took many different forms — from the pre-show mix tape (Human League, Toto, Fine Young Cannibals and my girl Tiffany) to the beats. But mostly, it’s in the way she embodies the Eighties ideal of a pop star — Madonna, Prince, Bruce — as an auteur who makes every album, every tour something new. Honestly, if Taylor Swift had just done the Red tour all over again, plugging in the new songs with some greatest hits, that would have been fine with absolutely everyone. Taking the easy way would have been 100 percent good enough. It just wasn’t what she wanted to do. Instead, she wanted to push a little harder and make a gloriously epic pop mess like this. What a night.

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1. “Welcome to New York” 2. “New Romantics” 3. “Blank Space” 4. “I Knew You Were Trouble” 5. “I Wish You Would” 6. “How You Get the Girl” 7. “I Know Places” 8. “All You Had to Do Was Stay” 9. “Can’t Feel My Face” with The Weeknd 10. “You Are in Love” 11. “Clean” 12. “Love Story” 13. “Style” 14. “This Love” 15. “Bad Blood” 16. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” 17. “Enchanted”/“Wildest Dreams” 18. “Out of the Woods” 19. “Shake It Off”

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Taylor Swift's 1989 World Tour: A Track By Track Breakdown

TOKYO -- It is here, Swifties. Taylor Swift' s 1989 World Tour has kicked off in Tokyo and not only are the 55,000 people at the Toyko Dome excited, but fans all over the world woke up super early to get their first glance at the show on the Internet (including me).

MTV News had someone at the show, giving us updates from within, while we scoured around for any bit of Tay we could scavenge! And from her sexy "I Know Places" costume to her hard rock version of "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" to onscreen cameos from the likes of Lena Dunham, Selena Gomez, HAIM, Karlie Kloss and Cara Delevingne, here's your look at Tay's tour -- one track at a time.

Let's begin, shall we?

'Welcome To New York'

Jun Sato/Getty Images for TS

Tay starts the show with "WTNY" in a glittery blazer. The dome is also a-glitter with light-up bracelets provided for everyone.

Here we gooooooo!

With her flock of male dancers, she welcomes the crowd, walking down a platform in heels. Behind her, a NYC-centric backdrop flashes like city streets.

"It's a new soundtrack/ I can dance to this beat/ Forever more."

"It's been waitin' for you."

Ummm... did girl just take her blazer off? Damn!

'New Romantics'

Fans really freaked when she went into "New Romantics," a bonus track off 1989 .

Let's all lose our chill together.

'Blank Space'

Aaaaand you know she couldn't get away without doing fan-favorite "Blank Space." (Although she didn't play "Wonderland.")

The blazer is back on!

"And you! Love! The game!"

'I Knew You Were Trouble'

"IKYWT" is remixed. She slows it down, gets sinister, almost channeling a Lorde-type vibe.

Plumes of smoke were thrown from the stage during the chorus.

And the colors of the bracelets were synched up to the show. During "IKYWT," they turned red.

We're only three songs in and it's a funeral for Swifties.

Gone is the purple skirt. Swift knows how to change outfits like a pro.

"Trouble, trouble, trouble."

'I Wish You Would'

Taylor talks to the crowd.

'How You Get The Girl'

Taylor switched into a pink dress, while her dancers brought out umbrellas for "How You Get The Girl."

The umbrellas light up! And there's more NYC imagery. The Brooklyn Bridge shows up in the background.

Fake rain falls onscreen as Taylor gets all cute.

Look at all those people!

'I Know Places'

Taylor quick-changes once again and she's off into "I Know Places."

That grunt doe.

OK, we're all on the same page about that growl.

She called everyone her friends.

'All You Had To Do Was Stay'

And then Taylor seduced us all with her crystalized blue eyes.

She's singing on the floor!

'You Are In Love'

She got on a stage extension and rose into the air for "You Are In Love."

It's acoustic and she's got the guitar out.

The crowd echoes her, just like in the recording!

She's wearing another crop top for this one -- this time it's royal blue.

Haim makes an appearance in a pre-taped video.

And so do her cats, Olivia and Meredith.

Now it's time for "Clean," and the visuals for the "Style" video are on. (Another hint that the video could've been for "Clean." )

And now she's lying on the cold, hard ground again.

'Love Story'

Swift brings it back to the good ol' days with "Love Story."

I'm almost certain she recycled her old outfits.

It's time for another outfit change and another song. It's "Style"!

"I've got that red lip classic thing that you like."

"Watch us go round and round each time."

'This Love'

She works a white, fringe leotard for "This Love."

"These hands had to let it go free and this love came back to me."

'Bad Blood'

Taylor is in LEATHER and singing "Bad Blood."

Again. Leather.

'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together'

Swizzle turns "WANEGBT" into a hard rock jam . So badass.

I'm not worthy.

'Enchanted'

She goes right from "Enchanted" into "Wildest Dreams."

'Wildest Dreams'

The piano comes out for "Wildest Dreams."

Somehow she managed to change into ANOTHER sparkly suit.

It looks just like Karlie Kloss' Victoria's Secret suit!

"Say you'll see me again even if it's just in your wildest dreams."

'Out Of The Woods'

During "Out of the Woods," some giant paper airplanes flew out. You know, like Harry Styles' plane ?

'Shake It Off'

Time to dance.

Is it over already?

All of Taylor's outfits throughout the night.

Some fans get to meet up after the show at "Loft 89."

"The view that took my breath away...55,000 strong." - Taylor Swift

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Review: On Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ Tour, the Underdog Emerges as Cool Kid

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By Jon Caramanica

• May 21, 2015

BOSSIER CITY, La. — Toward the end of Taylor Swift ’s concert at the CenturyLink Center here on Wednesday night, she strapped on an electric guitar for the first time of the night and began playing some tart riffs while singing hungry little fillips. She was setting the stage for “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” the 2012 song that became her first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and helped turn her inexorably away from country and toward pop megastardom.

In the song, she’s lashing out at a dunderheaded ex: “You would hide away and find your peace of mind/ With some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”

On the album, she delivers that self-referential line with an eye roll, but when she sang it here, she turned it into a defiant shout. Suddenly, the song wasn’t about fretting over someone’s opinion; it was about knowing you’ve been the cool one all along, and finally owning it.

Whatever underdog anxieties Ms. Swift might have had earlier in her career are mostly gone. With the release in the fall of “ 1989 ” (Big Machine), her fifth album, Ms. Swift neatly ascended to the top of the pop hierarchy, largely by bypassing and ignoring most of her peers. She used the same blend of guilelessness and savvy that made her a radical figure in country music, and applied it to 1980s-influenced sounds that made her one of the most conservative figures in pop.

So she’s still a kind of underdog, but a big dog, too. The “1989” album has gone platinum four times over, and this show was the first stand-alone date of the American leg of her “1989” world tour, which will mainly play stadiums. (This arena was far smaller, holding about 13,000 people.)

The album “1989” is what got her here, and “1989” is what she largely stuck to — newly grown-up songs about letdown, regret and letting go. “Out of the Woods” was booming and “Shake It Off” was cheeky and breezy. Even songs that felt like outliers on “1989” were here both integral and enrapturing, like “Clean,” which lost its spaciness; and “I Know Places,” notionally about hiding from prying eyes in a new relationship, which sounded like an action-movie soundtrack. For that song, her dancers wore drapey, futuristic jackets and shimmering full head masks similar to the ones Kanye West wore on his “Yeezus” tour — spies from the future sent to swarm Ms. Swift, who dodged them easily.

She largely didn’t meddle with the songs from “1989,” but when it came to older material, she bent the music in unexpected ways. She performed “Love Story” in the style of “1989.” On the catty, ecstatic “I Knew You Were Trouble,” she spent part of the song singing in a dusky, Lorde-like tone. And for “Enchanted,” one of her most starry-eyed and least convincing songs, she sat at a Thunderdome-esque piano and sang in a knowing manner, yanking the big notes hard and giving the song new depth.

Ms. Swift has always been comfortable onstage, but as she gets older (she’s 25), she is more willing to make herself awkward when it serves the moment. During “Blank Space,” she acted out that song’s angst, contorting her body and face and, at one point, wielding a golf club with casual menace.

Though her lyrics have gradually begun to acknowledge the sensual, she remains effectively chaste onstage, even when flanked by shirtless dancers on “I Knew You Were Trouble.” But her between-song chatter, always inspirational, now carries the weight of experience. “You are not damaged goods just because you’ve made mistakes,” she said. “You are not someone else’s opinion of you.”

This pep talk was for herself and for the crowd, which consisted mostly of girls, who might have been seeing Ms. Swift for the first time, and young women, who might have been seeing Ms. Swift since they were girls. At various intervals, Ms. Swift disappeared offstage and the huge screen showed clips of some of her well-known friends — Selena Gomez, Karlie Kloss, Lena Dunham, the sisters of the band Haim, and more — singing her praises. It was a public service announcement for the healing powers of female friendship.

Ms. Swift has been actively cultivating these friendships as part of her retreat from the tabloids in recent years. Rather than be known as a serial dater, she’d prefer to be thought of as a serial befriender. Even in “Bad Blood,” a song from “1989” about an intense rivalry with another female performer (most likely Katy Perry), Ms. Swift has found a way to turn it positive. The video is a feminist superhero fantasy, with oodles of famous guests — proof of the power and depth of Ms. Swift’s Rolodex and her desire to form alliances more than cast aspersions.

In an interview in the June issue of Elle magazine, Ms. Swift briefly alluded to the pop landscape she’s arrived at: “I don’t really have much of a queen complex,” she said. “There’s this feeling in music right now where you have to just stand on this castle turret and not come down and talk to anyone and not be approachable and not be excitable, and you should be sexy and edgy and all these things.”

No names were named — Beyoncé and Rihanna come to mind, though — but the comment highlights just how little Ms. Swift has in common with her new peers: almost as little as she had in common with her old peers. “I stalk you on a daily basis,” she told the crowd; it’s hard to imagine any other multiplatinum star doing that, much less admitting it.

Notably, there wasn’t even a hint of country here, unless you count the very young fans who still wore sundresses and cowboy boots, as Ms. Swift did a decade ago. She played acoustic guitar briefly, on “Wonderland,” a lesser-known song that wasn’t quite ready to be so exposed, but otherwise she’d fully decorated this new home, covering up all the traces of the old. (There were also some opening-night sound issues.)

If she can remake herself so thoroughly in just a couple of years, what changes are yet to come? Will she collaborate with Mr. West, her former adversary, as he has said he’d like to do? Will she go full Joni Mitchell? Could she become a romantic-comedy staple, a millennial Meg Ryan? Or will she stick with her current path, letting the arbiters of cool look at her with a side eye while she trounces them all?

Taylor Swift will perform at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on July 10 and 11; taylorswift.com/events.

Inside the World of Taylor Swift

A Triumph at the Grammys: Taylor Swift made history  by winning her fourth album of the year at the 2024 edition of the awards, an event that saw women take many of the top awards .

‘The T ortured Poets Department’: Poets reacted to Swift’s new album name , weighing in on the pertinent question: What do the tortured poets think ?  

In the Public Eye: The budding romance between Swift and the football player Travis Kelce created a monocultural vortex that reached its apex  at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. Ahead of kickoff, we revisited some key moments in their relationship .

Politics (Taylor’s Version): After months of anticipation, Swift made her first foray into the 2024 election for Super Tuesday with a bipartisan message on Instagram . The singer, who some believe has enough influence  to affect the result of the election , has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.

Conspiracy Theories: In recent months, conspiracy theories about Swift and her relationship with Kelce have proliferated , largely driven by supporters of former President Donald Trump . The pop star's fans are shaking them off .

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Taylor swift's '1989' world tour is engineered to be the best night of your life, and it is.

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Taylor Swift review – polished perfection remains accessible as 1989 tour winds down

Taylor Swift, ANZ Stadium, Sydney You can call it calculating or you can see it as Swift’s commitment to putting on a spectacular show. Or you can just surrender to the emotions

After more than six months of touring, Taylor Swift knows exactly what she’s doing, to quote from New Romantics, the final track of her indomitable album 1989 and the second of her live setlist.

On the first of her seven shows in Australia, the final leg of her world tour, there’s no pose held that isn’t obscenely flattering, no introduction that doesn’t seem scripted.

You could hold that up as evidence of her being “calculating”, the word often applied to her intense involvement in her public brand and career, or you could accept it as par for the course of being the biggest pop star in the world today: a visible, worked-for commitment to putting on a spectacular show that she upholds from the opener Welcome to New York to the crowd-pleasing closer Shake It Off.

Take the wristbands – given out on entry at ANZ Stadium – programmed to light up in time with her songs. It’s a sure-fire way to get tens of thousands of hands in the air, but it’s also a present from Swift to her fans, transforming the charmless, concrete dead zone into an infinite star-scape.

On the Mrs Carter tour of 2013 , when Beyoncé ruled the world, the sense was that she was the gift. Swift isn’t just accessible to fans; she works at a relationship with them, as you would an old friend you risk taking for granted. She thanks us for choosing her show over any other event Sydney has to offer: “I know there’s a lot of other places you could be”, as though any of the 76,000 people at her show had given serious consideration to the Supercross open or the short-course swimming championships on at the stadium complex the same night.

There are moments this “your friend, Taylor Swift” act wears a bit thin, like the coy disclosure “I put out an album called 1989” when we’d already heard at least three songs from it.

The video interviews of her famous friends extolling her virtues as a home baker seem particularly self-serving, a bid to shoehorn Lena Dunham and the Haim sisters into a set in which her “squad” risked going unmentioned. Even some of her most enthusiastic fans sit down as soon as Selena Gomez pops up on screen to chew the cud about what true love might be. (Disappointingly, she does not introduce a “special guest” tonight, despite much speculation as to who it might be.)

But the cynicism I feel at the start of her speech introducing Clean – about overcoming insecurities and negative self-talk and coming to terms with your mistakes – dissipates when I see the young girls hanging off her every word. There aren’t many celebrities with her profile and influence telling preteen girls that they are not somebody else’s opinion of them, that they are “not going nowhere just because you haven’t got to where you want to be yet”.

Pop stars don’t have to be good role models, but Swift takes her responsibilities seriously; there must be parents who are grateful to her for it. This earnestness extends to the rest of her performance as she mimes taking a Polaroid picture, winks at every click in Blank Space and flashes her eyes malevolently as she sings “I can make all the tables turn”.

She approaches her songs as her fans might lip-synch them alone in their bedrooms or (the older ones – and there are plenty of them here tonight, even without children as a cover) drunk at karaoke, all exaggerated gestures and literal interpretations.

There’s no doubt that Swift is a workhorse: the dance steps don’t come easy, and she leaves the flashy legwork to her all-male dancers. She seems much more at ease with her guitar for This Love and We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, and at a piano for the stripped-back take on Enchanted and Wildest Dreams.

The singles from 1989 receive the most rapturous reception from the crowd, not because they’re the best-known (she could’ve sung an early B-side and this crowd would have known every word), but because they’re the better songs. Over-saturation or snobbishness make it easy to forget what brilliant pop songs Style and Blank Space are: stylish, original, witty.

Swift’s performance tonight is a reminder that her clothes, her cats, her squad aside, it’s her songwriting that has won her enormous global fandom. Her great gift is treating love with such specificity – moving the furniture to dance (“is her apartment that small?” wonders my friend), driving at 2am – that it evokes your own experiences of it.

In Out of the Woods, giant paper airplanes circling above her, she sings about being in a snow mobile accident with Harry Styles; I think about an exchange in a burger bar in Melbourne. It was about my theory: once you’ve felt every emotion that Taylor Swift has sung about, life has no more highs or lows to offer you, and you keel over, spent. I ran through a lot of them on Saturday night.

• Taylor Swift
• New South Wales

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Taylor Swift launches U.S. tour in Louisiana

BOSSIER CITY, La. — For Taylor Swift, Wednesday's show at the CenturyLink Center was the first completely realized presentation of her 1989 World Tour. Though she had played two concerts in Tokyo earlier in the month and another at Las Vegas' Rock in Rio last weekend, the sold-out Bossier City date put her fully in her element. An 18-song production that sometimes drew inspiration from vintage movie musicals like Singing in the Rain and 42nd Street included every number from her latest album, 1989 . Perhaps more importantly, it gave her a chance to reconnect and talk directly with core fans.

Making the hall feel small. The 1989 World Tour is all about Swift finding ways to get closer to her audience. She accomplished that in ways large and small Wednesday. Between songs, she shared stories and dispensed sisterly advice. She also had a catwalk that ran nearly the length of the CenturyLink Center floor. It rose and rotated at various times during Swift's set, putting the singer, and sometimes her dancers, at eye level with the people in the second tier of seats.

Everything has changed. Few artists would risk jettisoning most of their early hits from their set list, but Swift performed just one full song from her first three albums. She revamped her previous material "in the vibe of 1989 ," she said. So I Knew You Were Trouble took a dark, almost threatening turn; Love Story slowed down to a bass-heavy synth-pop number; and We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together became a fist-pumping punk-pop number that would have done Joan Jett proud.

Guess Molly Ringwald's in her club now. As Swift introduced I Wish You Would , she talked about Sunday's "fangirl moment" with Ringwald at the Billboard Music Awards. "I had such a hard time forming words when I was talking to her," Swift said, adding that Ringwald's films with director John Hughes, like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles , helped "define my ideas of what love and romance should be."

Everyone goes home with something. Swift's merchandise tables offered a varied selection of $35 T-shirts, as well as a $50 throw blanket with the 1989 album-cover design. At the top end was a $250 framed set of nine photographs, but Swift also made sure younger fans had some $5 options, including photographs, bracelets and glow batons. Everybody got at least one souvenir, though: Each of the 13,500 ticketholders received a bracelet with programmable LED bulbs that flickered in sync, lighting up the entire hall.

This gun's for hire. Australian singer-songwriter Vance Joy opened the show with a seven-song set that included his hit Riptide and a solo acoustic cover of Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark .

Swift's set list follows:

• Welcome to New York
• New Romantics
• Blank Space
• I Knew You Were Trouble
• I Wish You Would
• How You Get the Girl
• I Know Places
• All You Had to Do Was Stay
• We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
• Enchanted/Wildest Dreams
• Out of the Woods

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