26-06-2025
Why Taylor Swift's surprise TEU concert was more impressive than you think
From the outside, Taylor Swift's impromptu performance of her hit "Shake It Off" on Tuesday night in Nashville at the Tight End University party looked pretty straight forward. She's a 14-time Grammy winner that just spent nearly two years on a record breaking worldwide tour. Easy stuff, right?
Well, not necessarily. If you look deeper, Swift showed off her true musical prowess. First of all, Swift was using country singer Chase Rice's guitar. While guitars are guitars are guitars, artists do get comfortable with their own equipment. Secondly, she performed without any warm-up or any in-ear assistance to help with hearing their own voice and the back up band.
Most impressively, however, is the quick annotation of the chords for the accompanying band to play. An Instagram story from user @bellestapp showed hand-scribbled pages that were given to the band on stage.
📷| Taylor scribbled down the chords for the band right before joining them on stage to perform Shake It Off with Chase Rice's guitar and no in-ears. What a lovely impromptu moment it was!
— Taylor Swift Updates 🩶 (@swifferupdates) June 25, 2025
The formatting of the notes is also something specific as it's referred to as Nashville notation. Nashville notation essentially is a shorthand usually used in country music to easily communicate chord progressions. It's a format that is often deployed during live gigs like Tuesday night so that the band can easily and quickly make key changes without rewriting everything.
Quite the impressive performance.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Taylor Swift surprise concert at TEU in Nashville had music notation
