Six months after she performed the last concert of the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift was finally ready to shake off her hiatus from the stage — at least for the length of one rousing song — as she picked up an acoustic guitar and sang “Shake It Off” for a stunned audience at a club in Nashville Tuesday night.
The apparently fairly impromptu performance took place at the 1,200 capacity Brooklyn Bowl, where fans had gathered to see Kane Brown, Chase Rice and other country artists perform at a Tight End University benefit concert dubbed “Tight Ends & Friends.” Attendees had an inkling, or a hope, that Swift might be in the audience, since her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, was on board as one of the charity event’s hosts. But few imagined they would be serenaded by Swift herself.
Her surprise performance happened at the end of Kane Brown’s set, when he happily ceded the stage to the pop superstar. “Do y’all care if I bring out a really, really, really, really special guest?” he asked the crowd, picking up a jingle stick that he would shake as Swift’s percussionist for the number that followed.
Swift strode out on stage bearing a guitar that she had just borrowed from Rice. She said, “You know, the one thing tight ends have in common with Nashville musicians is we’re all friends, right? So you know, we’re up there and we’re having some drinks” — indicating the balcony section where she had been holding court with Kelce, her childhood friend Abigail Anderson Berard and other guests. “And we were thinking, like, ‘How loud could this place get? Theoretically, how loud could the singing be in here?’ So, I was like, I don’t have a guitar, but then Chase Rice was like, ‘You can use mine.’
“We would like to dedicate this to our favorite players who are going to play,” she said, riffing on the famous “players gonna play” line from “Shake It Off,” “and these are the tight ends.”
Mid-song, she gave a shout out to the fellow star whose party she had crashed, asking, “Honestly, have you ever seen a tambourine played like this? This is fantastic work over here by Mr. Kane Brown.”
Brown seemed quite happy to have the show stolen from him, which he joked about in an Instagram post he put up after the show. “When you think you’re the special guest BUT you’re not,” Brown wrote in a caption to a photo of himself with Swift and Kelce.
As she wrapped up the number, Swift offered an indication of just how quickly the performance came together, saying, “Will you please give it up for this amazing band who just figured out that we were going to play that three minutes ago?”
If there was anything that was guaranteed, it was that there would be close to 1,200 fairly high-quality videos immediately posted on social media, all capturing the riotous atmosphere in close-up detail.
The benefit concert is the only public event associated with Tight End University, which as a gathering is otherwise limited to the fewer than 100 NFL tight ends who come together in Nashville for meetings, discussions and analysis each year. It was started four years ago by George Kittle, the tight end for the San Francisco 49ers, who subsequently brought in Kelce and Greg Olsen to help spearhead the event.
The day before, Swift had joined Kelce at a private welcome reception held at the Nashville nightclub L.A. Jackson, followed by the pair making a visit to Jason Aldean’s Kitchen and Rooftop Bar.