Fans gain a private Eras Tour moment moved into museum light, after Taylor Swift performed a six-minute solo piano mashup of “All Too Well,” “I Knew It, I Knew You” and “August” at the Clive Davis Theater. The performance, recorded at a semi-secret session last week attended by fewer than 200 people, appears in a video the Recording Academy posted Monday to its YouTube channel.
Swift played the piece at the end of a program that began with a 42-minute interview with Recording Academy chief Harvey Mason Jr., then introduced the songs at the piano. She identified the instrument as the same piano she took on the Eras Tour and framed the performance as an echo of the surprise medleys she created on that stadium run. “This is the piano that I brought with me all around the world on the Eras Tour,” she says in the video, “and one of my favorite things that I would do on the Eras Tour and something that really became something the fans paid a lot of attention to and would make a lot of guesses about every night was, I had this section called the acoustic section. I would do different songs every night, one on guitar and one on piano, and I started to really have a blast with creating medleys towards the middle/end part of the tour. And I’d really just think about different songs I could mash up with other songs (as) kind of a surprise and delight moment for fans. And a way that I would pick the songs is, I’d find some sort of through line, whether that was rhythmically or these are all about a similar emotion. And I prepared one for you today that, if I was still on the Eras Tour, I would do this one. And it’s songs that are connected to each other by the common theme of being about memory and reliving certain detailed memories of your life and the significance of those memories.”
The mashup knots elements of the three songs so they overlap and reappear, blurring where one finishes and another begins. The arrangement leans into memory as the through line Swift described, weaving the wistful and the sunnier passages into a single arc that grows more entangled before it concludes.
“I Knew It, I Knew You” is continuing to register on charts, the video noting that the track is still performing well on the country chart and on Billboard’s Hot 100. Before she moved to the piano, Swift used the conversation with Mason to revisit her country roots. “I think this can happen as you grow up,” she told Mason, referring to renewed engagement with country music. “I love my country roots more and more, the further along this path I get, and I want to honor them more and more, and I feel more tied and more loyal to them. The people that shaped who I am as an artist and as a writer, that all happened in Nashville.”
Swift also reflected on early songwriting, pointing to her first single “Tim McGraw” as an example of detailed storytelling. “That song, when I look back on it, it kind of establishes a pattern of writing in detail,” she said, adding that lines can hold double meanings. Mason reacted to the anecdote with a laugh, “Ah. So now we know!”
She moved through discussion of Speak Now, citing “Enchanted,” “Never Grow Up” and “Mean” to illustrate how she shapes production to match a feeling and how that practice later let her write to preexisting tracks. The video makes that creative logic audible, tracing how Swift links disparate songs across eras through theme and arrangement.
The Recording Academy’s upload makes the intimate performance available to a broad audience, but Swift offered no fresh clues about future releases such as a deluxe edition of her debut. The Eras Tour itself wrapped in December 2024, and the museum session shows how she can translate stadium surprises into a small, focused performance.
