Before she was ruling the pop world and feuding with the likes of Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry, Taylor Swift was just a young woman writing and playing country music in Nashville, Tennessee. Taylor went back to her roots Saturday night with a surprise performance at the Bluebird Café in Music City.
The Bluebird Café is important to Taylor because it's where she was discovered when she was in the eighth grade (yeah, let that sink in). Taylor wasn't on the official schedule—she crashed (with permission) her old friend, country songwriter Craig Wiseman's set, shocking the 40 or so people in the audience.
"I wanted to say a big thank you to the Bluebird Café," Swift said, according to The Tennessean. "I think any songwriter in town would echo my sentiments and say that this is kind of the only place where this exists—this particular place where you get to come and hear the writer's take on the songs they've put out into the world."
Taylor performed "Shake It Off," "Love Story," and Little Big Town's "Better Man."
"When I would play writers' nights…I didn't have the experience of a writer writing something and then it going out into the world and you hearing it from someone else's perspective until recently," she said "Better Man" when she performed the song. "Little Big Town gave me the opportunity to feel that way…to be at the Bluebird and play a song you've maybe heard on the radio. I will always be forever grateful to them for that."
Taylor also did a couple of shots of Fireball on stage, which is almost definitely something else she didn't experience in her middle school days performing at the Bluebird.
