For the entire duration of the Eras Tour, which kicked off in March 2023, Taylor Swift has performed two surprise acoustic songs at every show.
With the help of an acoustic guitar and an upright piano with flowers painted on it, Swift performs songs that aren’t on the main setlist during the acoustic portion of the show. After initially declaring that she wouldn’t repeat any surprise songs unless she made a mistake, the pop star amended her own rule during a February show in Melbourne.
“I’ve been thinking, I want to be as creative as possible with the acoustic set moving forward. I don’t wanna limit anything and I don’t wanna just say, ‘Oh, if I’ve played a song before I can’t play it again.’ So from now on, I don’t wanna take any paint colors out of the paintbox of colors,” she told the audience at Melbourne Cricket Ground. “I want to be able to play songs more than once if I feel like it, and I wanna be able to make changes to songs.”
Swift has played certain songs during numerous acoustic sets (the Midnights tune “You’re On Your Own, Kid” has been performed a whopping nine times) while others haven’t made the show even once. With just five months left until the Eras Tour wraps up in Vancouver on December 8, it’s possible that some tunes will never have their moment in the spotlight.
Not counting songs that aren’t featured on any of Swift’s albums — like the 2020 single “Only the Young” or tracks featuring Swift like Big Red Machine’s “Renegade” — there are 20 remaining songs from the pop star’s discography that haven’t been played on the Eras Tour.
With just over 30 shows left, Swift still has time to play them all if she wants to, especially since she’s been doing more song mashups recently. During her July 6 performance in Amsterdam, Swift managed to play five surprise songs by performing a mashup of “Sweeter Than Fiction” and “Holy Ground” followed by a mashup of “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My),” “So High School” and “Everything Has Changed.”
However, there are some tunes that Swift is likely to skip altogether. For example, “Soon You”ll Get Better,” which she wrote about her parents’ cancer diagnoses, and “Ronan,” which is about a 3-year-old boy of the same name who died from neuroblastoma in 2011.
Swift has only performed “Soon You’ll Get Better” live once, during a Global Citizen benefit event in April 2020 to raise funds for the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solitary Response Fund. She previously told Billboard in August 2019 that she didn’t know if she’d ever play the Lover track live.
“It was hard to write. It’s hard to sing. It’s hard to listen to, for me,” she told the outlet.
“Forever Winter” is another song that might be too difficult to perform live, as some fans have speculated that the song is about Swift processing the loss of her friend Jeff Lang, who died in 2010.
“If I was standing there in your apartment / I’d take that bomb in your head and disarm it,” Swift sings on the Red vault track. “I’d say I love you even at your darkest and / Please don’t go.”
Swift has also steered clear of both “London Boy” and “So Long, London,” both of which are about her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn. Swift routinely performs songs about Alwyn during both the main Eras Tour set and the acoustic portion of the show, so it’s possible that one or both of the tunes will be played when she returns to London’s Wembley Stadium in August.
Swift has made a habit of playing songs about places in the appropriate concert venues. In May, she played “Paris” in the French city of the same name and one year prior she played “Welcome to New York” at MetLife Stadium (which is technically in East Rutherford, New Jersey, but close enough). The Eras Tour will not return to Florida, so it’s likely that Swift’s song of the same name, which features Florence and the Machine, is another tune that’s never making the acoustic set.
Keep scrolling to see every song that Swift has yet to play during the Eras Tour:
‘Taylor Swift’ (Debut)
“A Perfectly Good Heart”
‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’
“Change”
“Superstar”
“We Were Happy”
“That’s When (feat. Keith Urban)”
“Don’t You”
“Bye Bye Baby”
“Ronan”
‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’
- “Girl at Home”
- “Forever Winter”
- “Run (feat. Ed Sheeran)”
‘Reputation’
- “I Did Something Bad”
‘Lover’
- “London Boy”
- “Soon You’ll Get Better (feat. The Chicks)”
‘Evermore’
- “Happiness”
- “Closure”
‘The Tortured Poets Department’
- “So Long, London”
- “Florida!!! (feat. Florence and the Machine)”
- “Cassandra”
- “Robin”
