Taylor Swift
With Ed Sheeran
American Airlines Arena, Miami
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Better Than: One Direction's Harry Styles caught wearing a shiny gold thong while ironing his tighty whities.
Taylor Swift may get trashed for writing songs about almost every single one of her ex-boyfriends. But man, can she put on a show.
Still, if it isn't her much-rumored, rapid-fire Hollywood hook-ups that gets the haters chattering, it's her on-stage performances.
T-Swift connects with her fans and keeps them on their toes. Maybe she'll bust out on the banjo, dress as a 1940s Hollywood star, come out from under the stage in a giant music box, or soar from one side of the arena to the other on a flying pedestal.
One thing's for sure, after watching Tay-Tay do work for nearly two hours, it's easy to see why half of Hollywood's most eligible bachelors fall for the Southern belle.
There were thousands of screaming tweens wrapped in Christmas lights, sporting cowboy boots and shredded red tie-dyed t-shirts. And regular fans, who've got nothin' but love for the girl, went wild as Taylor took the stage with her beat-busting hit, "State of Grace."
Fathers dressed in black slacks and pastel button-downs adorably sang along with their T-Swift-obsessed daughters. Even a buff middle-aged dude jammed out to "Mean."
The crowd shouted each and every word (as they did with almost every song) and T-Swift strutted 'round the stage, wearing a white lace top, black leather booty shorts, ruby red slippers, and a black felt fedora while clutching a bedazzled red mic.
After one of Taylor's infamously awkward dances and a sequence involving flying drummers dressed in red hazmat suits springing from the stage on bungee straps during "Holy Ground," Taylor gave a shout out to her fans.
"People say I write songs about my feelings, which I do... but 13,000 of you opted in to hear about my feelings for two hours," Swift bragged. "There's this one color that represents the emotions of the songs I've been writing about, like passion, love, miscommunication, danger... these emotions are red."
After pouring out her feelings to the crowd some more, the cheers got louder until Taylor began singing the most appropriate song one can sing after talking about the color of passion, "Red" and surprised the entire arena as she jammed out on her electric, ruby red guitar.
Different props were used during almost every single one of her performances, ranging from 1940s Hollywood glam during "The Lucky One" (when T-Swift rushed onto the stage wearing a red, Marilyn Monroe-like dress) to rodeo-like stage props that set the mood for "Stay, Stay, Stay" (during which bassist Amis Heller went solo and started slappin' the bass to the beat of the Lumineers, "Ho Hey").
For the next couple of songs, Tay-Tay was carried by dancers through the wild Miami mob of screaming tweens, trying desperately to touch Taylor as she floated swiftly past them, toward a stage at the back of the arena.
After singing "Fairytale," "Begin Again," and a duet with opener Ed Sheeran, Taylor was harnessed onto a flying pedestal as she sang "Sparks Fly" and returned to the main stage. Sparks may not have flown, but T-Swift surely did.
What really blew fans away was the instrumental dubstep rendition of "I Knew You Were Trouble." It started off with a violist dressed in a tight black leather outfit, lying on the floor while playing a decked-out ruby red violin and bow.
After running across the stage doing some pretty X-rated moves for a Taylor Swift concert, Tay-Tay popped out again, wearing a Victorian-era dress. She teased the crowd a bit and left some thinking, What is she wearing? Then she made her way across the stage and was stripped down to a tight lingerie-like outfit.
From there, the props and costumes just got straight-up weird, with mimes with red Japanese umbrellas walking on stilts, jokers covered in red-and-white checkers from head to toe, and winged fairies wearing white tutus.
And the weirdness only grew until the final song, "We Are Never Getting Back Together," which ended with a blizzard of confetti and a wise word from T-Swift herself.
"Please," Taylor advised, "never get back with your horrible exes."
It was a teenage fairy tale come true. Except for the creepy mimes.
Taylor Swift's Setlist:
-"State of Grace"
-"Holy Ground"
-"Red"
-"You Belong With Me"
-"The Lucky One"
-"Mean"
-"Stay, Stay, Stay"
-"22"
-"Fairytale"
-"Everything Has Changed" (duet with Ed Sheeran)
-"Begin Again"
-"Sparks Fly"
-"I Knew You Were Trouble"
-"All Too Well"
-"You Belong With Me"
-"Treacherous"
-"We Are Never Getting Back Together"
