Taylor Swift membawa konser besarnya "Speak Now Tour" ke Nashville untuk dua pertunjukan di arena Bridgestone Jumat dan Sabtu minggu lalu. Dan ini adalah wawancara Taylor dengan Tennessean Music.
You first previewed this show back in May, and you’ve been out on the road ever since. Has it felt like long time for you?
"With this tour, it doesn’t feel like we’ve been out for a long time, because It’s just such a mind challenge to put on that show. I feel like there are 50 million things to remember over the course of those two hours, and when you get them right, you’re so proud of yourself, and so at the end of every show, I just feel so happy and the good kind of exhausted and the right kind of challenged. It’s been so fun to put on this show, because I’m never bored. There’s always something new we’re throwing into the show. I’m always covering some new song. We’re always having some special guest come out and perform, and it’s been such an amazing tour, just because of the spontaneous nature of it."
With a lot of these dates – like the four-show stint in L.A. – you’re staying in one place for more than one night. Do you enjoy settling in?
"Well, the thing about playing multiple nights – we’ve been having a lot of times when we’ve played three shows or two or four shows in a city – I really like that. It’s nice for the crew to get to relax and go home after the show instead of having to load out and pack up for a different city, and I sleep better when I’m not on a bus, so it’s nice to stay in a city for a little while. It also shows a lot of dedication when a city has created four sold-out shows for us. It means a lot."
How do these surprise performances with special guests come together? Is it a day-of-show, impromptu sort of thing?
"What I’ll do is I’ll look forward, really forward in my schedule. The first time it really happened was when I saw that we had four shows in L.A. I have a lot of friends in L.A., and I wanted to give every single crowd that came to see us over four nights a very different experience. It started out with, I really wanted Nicki Minaj to come out. I knew the VMAs were the same week. I really wanted to sing “Super Bass” with Nicki Minaj. For the last year, it’s been like my top dream. And so I just got her number and called her and we worked it out. She was so kind to come straight from the VMAs right to our show. It was just magical how that happened. And then my friends have a band called Hot Chelle Rae that are doing really well right now, and they happened to be in town, so I invited them for a night, and then Jason Mraz sings one of my favorite songs in the world called “I’m Yours.” He lives in L.A., so I invited him out for one night. The last minute one was when Justin Bieber called me the day of the show, and said ‘Hey, I’d love to come out.’"
Was that a song you were prepared to do that day?
"Well, I had texted him a couple days before just to check and see if he was in town, and then he called the day of and said ‘Hey, I’ll be there. I’m bringing my dancers.’ I was so excited. My crowd was very excited."
At the end of your performance with Nicki, she credited you with starting the “Super Bass frenzy.” Do you think that’s a fair assessment?
"All I did was like the song very loudly. That song speaks for itself. It’s such a hit."
I saw the viral video where you first rapped a bit of it in the River studios, and you seemed pretty reluctant to do so. Flash forward a few months, and you’re rapping an Eminem song in an arena…
"Well, you know, things are very different when you’re on stage, and then when you’re doing something a cappella just randomly, you know? If someone says, ‘Hey! Hey! Sing ‘Love Story,’’ I’m going to be a little reluctant to just start singing, but if it’s during my show, I’ll sing anything. I think that, for me, when I busted out a rap song in my acoustic set, that’s because I love the song that much that I think my fans would like hearing it during the show, and I really don’t have a problem with doing that."
So doing a rap song live wasn’t something you had to really convince yourself to do?
"It was all good. There were 15,000 people rapping along with me."
Between the covers and the special guests, very few shows are alike. Is that something you do for the fans, for you to break up the monotony, or both?
"Bringing up special guests is something that I really like doing for the fans, because I want them to get so much out of deciding to spend their night at my show. I want them to leave going, ‘Wow, we really made the choice by spending our Saturday night there.’ It means a lot to me that people make plans to go and see my show. It’s such a big commitment to go and buy tickets and go through the hassle of waiting in traffic and finding parking and going into the venue and waiting in lines and waiting in more lines and buying t-shirts. That’s a big deal. That’s a big commitment, and the fact that thousands of people are willing to make that commitment, it really resonates with me. For me, I just want them to get as much out of the show as they possibly can, and so if I have artists that I’m a fan of and they happen to be friends, or even if I don’t know them, I’ll reach out to them and ask if they’re in town, and see if they want to come out and sing for my crowd and sing with me. It’s just so much fun, both for my crowd and for me, to have people come out and surprise the audience."
Do you have special guests lined up for Nashville?
"I hate to advertise things before they happen, but I also have friends in Nashville whose music I’m a fan of…and it could be really fun. It could be a really fun two shows. I really have fun having people come out to the shows because my crowds are so frenzied and loud. They scream so loudly for every guest performer. I have so much fun, not only seeing the crowds react, but also seeing the guest performers react when they see how amazing the crowds are. They’re an amazing audience, everywhere we go."
What’s it like to come back to Nashville after being away for weeks or months, and at this stage in your career?
"Well, I just recently came back to Nashville for two days, and I’d been out on the road for a month. Coming back, it’s crazy, because I go straight into work mode, and both days, (I spent) the majority of my time in the studio, and then every split second that I wasn’t in the studio, I was spending with my family, and knocking on my brother’s door and seeing how he’s been. It’s funny because when you haven’t been there for a while, you get home, and you’re wiped out. I took a red eye home and my door sensor was beeping every five minutes. I was stumbling around the house in mid-sleep trying to figure out what this beeping was. This always happens. When I came home from my three month tour in Asia and Europe, there was a light that wouldn’t turn off, a chandelier that would not turn off above my bed. There’s always something that hysterically keeps me from sleeping when I’m so excited to be home in my own bed."
When you’re back here, or at a country awards show, or anywhere where there’s mostly country artists, does it feel like a separate world from when you’re abroad, on stage with people like Bieber and Nicki Minaj?
"I feel like there’s a lot of camaraderie in music. I haven’t felt too much like there are different neighborhoods, and when you cross over into one, it’s a lot different than the others. I really tend to go and gravitate towards the nice people in whatever genre I’m kind of hanging out in at the time. If I’m in L.A., the people I’m going to call and come hang out and play a song in my show are the nice people that I’ve had really great experiences with, who’ve been awesome and sincere. That’s the same thing in Nashville. The people who I look up to, the people who’ve been wonderful to me and the people who I consider friends are the nice ones, who love being in this community and love all of the other artists. They’re not cutthroat. They’re the ones who will come and help you out, and sing a song for the crowd at your show."
You’ve also helped out a few other Nashville acts – bringing out Hot Chelle Rae at the Staples Center, and mentioning the Civil Wars on Twitter/interviews. Is that something you feel moved to share?
"I just really love great music in whatever form it comes in. When I really fall in love with a new artist, a new act or a new song, it’s impossible for me to not tweet about how much I love it, or the lyrics or mention it in interviews. There are so many opportunities for you to say what kind of music you like. People are always asking in interviews, ‘What music are you a fan of right now?’ There’s always something new that I love. I’m so excited to see that sometimes that makes a little bit of a difference, a little bit of a ripple in people taking notice of new great bands."
Production-wise, this tour is in another league from your previous ones. What was the process like to get the whole thing together?
"All of the parts and moving pieces that all combine to create this show, when they were all scattered all over the floor and weren’t put together yet, it was a little overwhelming. I had the initial meetings with my tour designer and my stage designer, and I had listed all of these things that I wanted to do, and I said, ‘I know we can’t do all of these things in one show, but I just wanted to give you all of my ideas, and then we can pare them down.’ He looked up at me and said, ‘Of course we can do all of these things in one show.’ That’s how this show came together. Every single tiny idea or epiphany that had popped into my imagination ended up in the show. We didn’t cut anything out. Having every single song have its own scenery, vibe and its own treatment, that was a little overwhelming at first. But we worked little by little putting these parts together, and we rehearsed for over a month, and planned it for half a year, and to my complete surprise, it ended up coming together, and coming together so well that were already prepared to open up our rehearsal to the public when the tornadoes hit."
Were you happy with the way the Nashville dress rehearsal [for tornado relief] went?
"The dress rehearsal, thankfully, in my mind, really went off without a hitch. There weren’t any technical things that went wrong, and I was expecting a lot of things to go wrong, and for us to have to start something, stop it and start over. But it was actually exactly like a show."
This all sounds like fun, but are you looking forward to getting some time off at the end of the year?
"Actually, I don’t know what I’m going to do when I’m not on this tour anymore. I think I’m so in love with this tour that I just I love being on it. I love being a part of it. I love the schedule. I love the crowds. I love the feeling you get when you walk off stage, and it was a good show. Of course, I’ll move on to the next thing after this tour’s over, and that will probably be overdrive recording and obsessing over my next album. That whole process kind of works naturally in a two-year phase, when you’re creating an album for two years, and you’re finally ready to put it out, it’s all you think about. Hopefully we’ll get there, and there will be plenty to do at the end of this tour. There will be plenty of things to plan for, and then we continue in Australia in February, so I won’t have to say goodbye to it completely."
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