Taylor Swift brings daydreams to town.
Taylor Swift With: Ed Sheeran When: Tuesday night. Second show Wednesday at 7 p.m. Where: Rexall Place Tickets: Sold out In 2013, borders are for suckers. Desperate to attract any drinker, small-town bars first came up with this idea, Taylor Swift’s world-conquering alchemy: Hot country one night, dance music another, and slowly but surely a little of both till chocolate met peanut butter, the modern love story.
With more A-list awards than any human has digits, Taylor Swift and her 24-or-so semis out back are a long way from that legendary tear in a beer, and her first of two shows Tuesday night at the NHL arena had lavish video productions, drummers on strings, dubstep, banjo, clockwork ballet, spinning flags, endless confession — just a non-stop, postmodern twist of expectations soaring frictionlessly between genres, decades and emotion-matching costume changes, each matching the nine-month tour’s name, Red.
Swift, 23, rocketed sparks with her opening modern rock number State of Grace, that perfect face dominating onscreen, soon amid choreographed moves down an anchor-shaped stage.
“I tend to get along best with daydreamers,” she explained before the country number, Mean. “Meanness is not something that people outgrow, it turns out. There’s always going to be someone who picks on you.”
Then she turned the rink into a giant carousel, one of the best modern country moments I’ve ever seen, a little Ryman on the blue-line.
A few songs, like the somewhat flat Stay Stay Stay, evaporated compared to the giant 22, where, Swift in hot pants rode man back through the pumped crowd.
Swift explained her return to Edmonton. “Where were the really notoriously crazy crowds? I missed you terribly. Here tonight, 13,000 of you have opted to hear me sing about my feelings for the next two hours. I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for making my music the soundtrack to your crazy emotions.”
The always-smiling, mouth-never-closed blond singer disappeared into the floor as the TVs floated around, forming an up-front stage where she sang the shoop-shoop You Belong to Me. During the stellar and mournful Lucky One, 15 dancers dressed all 1950s swirled around her with flash-bulb cameras and movie theatre ropes.
The obligatory solo/stool/ spotlight moment was White Horse, one of many breakup songs she openly admitted writing.
Opening, Joel Crouse of Holland, Mass., was first out with an amplified acoustic man cluster and some kindly country pop. If You Want Some, the 21-year-old’s first hit, isn’t even his best, but he’s perfectly tuned to the kind of self-referential optimism that has even living country legends spinning in their graves.
The first spine-shattering shrieks amid the overwhelmingly young, female crowd came for Ed Sheeran, a Hobbity tangent off Nick Drake who single-handedly proves whatever country music fans evolved into since Garth Brooks transfused all that Kiss blood into their veins, they no longer belong to the southern U.S.
The idea any of this music would or should be traditional is misplaced, really, Swift’s operating system having a lot more to do with Shania Twain than Patsy Cline or even Dolly Parton. She’s the now and immediate future of country, strict musical borders a done deal on the global cruise ship.
Sheeran’s slow peaks and long whoas of Give Me Love tasted like young Van Morrison in the zone.
“Can I get a hell, yeah?” he yelled, “If you are too cool to sing, you came to the wrong concert!”
From Framlington, U.K., the ginger singer quickly proved himself a rousing sort of awesome, creating his own looping band behind himself with a multi-channel beatbox recorder as he pushed live through the thrilling greenery of his African, Caribbean and East Coast rap influences. He’d be brilliant as a folk-fest headliner for his second visit to Edmonton.
“If you put an R in front of it, it would be Redmonton,” Swift joked before their duet, Everything Has Changed. She rode a floating platform for Sparks Fly, shifting into 5th for I knew You Were Trouble: Suddenly we were in a goth/dubstep castle with Skrillex, a Pennsylvanian in Transylvania!
Confessional as Oprah, she saved for the end the eclipsing We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together, a full circus with clowns, confetti and bunny costumes.
Its remnant acoustic guitar strumming through the giant beats, those soaring Brit multitrack vocals and even the subject matter all comes together to where Taylor Swift is today, 26 million albums and 75 million downloads down the road.
Apparently she dated some dudes, too.