Taylor Swift performed at the Grammy Awards for the first time in five years, bringing her “Folklore” collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner with her for the first stage performance they did together.
She started the presentation with “Cardigan”, lying on a lawn and singing to the audience. The camera revealed an environment very much in line with “Folklore”: a dream forest, with Swift on the roof of a hut. In that booth were Antonoff and Dessner, ready for the “August” release, with the singer strumming the guitar along with them. They ended with “Willow”, the opening track for “Evermore”.
Swift last appeared at the Grammy in 2016, which was the last time she competed for the album of the year award, when “1989” prevailed in that category.
In a video that was posted on the Recording Academy website just two days before the Grammy, Swift indicated that most things about her performance were “highly confidential”, but that she wanted to reveal in advance that Dessner and Antonoff would be participating.
“We only get together in the same room once, so it’s really amazing to be together with them again. We are quarantined in the same house, we are being tested every day, ”she said in the teaser video. “It is really exciting, honestly, to play music with your collaborators. This is something that I will never, ever take for granted again. “
Swift did not promote “Folklore” or its successor, “Evermore”, with many television appearances. In September, she returned after a long absence to the Academy of Country Music Awards (without her producer / co-writers) to sing a seated version of “Betty”, the most country song in “Folklore”.
The “one time” Swift referred to in the Recording Academy teaser that she, Antonoff and Dessner teamed up with last year to shoot “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions”, an Apple TV Plus special that joined the trio for first time, after having recorded all the songs from that album in shared isolation during the first months of the pandemic. The Grammy performance marked the first time that they performed as a unit in front of an audience.
Swift competed for six awards at the 2021 Grammy, including album of the year for “Folklore” and song of the year for “Cardigan”.
