Taylor Swift’s huge rule change for Aussie shows

Taylor Swift announced on stage in Melbourne on Sunday night that she’d decided to break her own rules for the Aussie leg of her Eras world tour.

Touring pop superstar Taylor Swift announced on stage in Melbourne on Sunday night that she’d decided to tweak her own rules during the Australian leg of her massive Eras world tour.

Swift’s career-spanning Eras tour is a mammoth affair, stretching for almost three-and-a-half hours per show as she performs songs from her entire career – 44, to be exact.

Late in the set each night comes a real fan favourite moment: The “surprise songs” set, where Swift picks a handful of additional songs not on her setlist to perform acoustically for fans.

More than 70 shows into her tour, Swift’s made a setlist change. Picture: Getty

Swift moves to Sydney this week for another four shows. Picture: Getty

So far on tour, Swift hasn’t repeated those songs – but more than 70 songs into the tour, Swift announced on stage at Melbourne’s MCG on Sunday night that she would now be breaking her own rule.

“I want to be as creative as possible with the acoustic set moving forward and I don’t want to limit anything or say, ‘Oh, if I played this song, I can’t play it again,’” she told the crowd. “So, from now on, I don’t want to take any paint colours out of the paintbox [or] tools out of the toolbox.”

“I want to be able to play songs more than once if I feel like it and I want to be able to make changes to songs. Does that sound OK?” she asked, to cheers from the near-100,000-strong crowd at the MCG.

This actually isn’t the first time Swift has tweaked her “no repeats” rule during the Eras tour.

“When I started the tour, I said, ‘In the acoustic section, I am never repeating a song. I’m never doing songs more than once’,” she told the crowd during a Florida concert in April last year. “But now I’m like, ‘Ugh, there are so many songs I want to do more than once.”

So she introduced a new rule there: If a surprise song was from her latest album, Midnights, she could perform it as many times as she wanted - because Midnights is, like, the most accurate picture of my life to date.”

Swift wows the crowd at the MCG. Picture: Getty

The first caveat Swift made to her own surprise songs rule came early in the tour, when she announced she’d allow herself to repeat a song if she’d made a mistake playing it during its first outing.

Here are the surprise songs Swift has performed so far in Australia:

February 16 – Melbourne: Red and You’re Losing Me

February 17 – Melbourne: A medley of Getaway Car / August / The Other Side of the Door as well as This Is Me Trying

February 18 – Melbourne: Come Back … Be Here / Daylight and Teardrops on My Guitar

Swift now has a four-day break from touring before Eras moves to Sydney’s Accor Stadium on Friday for a four-show stint. She’s still only around halfway through the 151-show Eras tour though, which is currently scheduled to finish on December 8 in Vancouver, Canada.

Meanwhile, a young Swiftie at Friday’s first Melbourne show has shared her story after being plucked from the crowd to meet the singer.

Milana Bruno, 9, was so far back in the crowd that she and her younger sister could barely see the stage.

“My girls were dancing on the chairs because they were so far back they couldn’t really see her,” Milana’s mother Renato Bruno told the Herald Sun.

Staff members noticed the young girl, and brought her forward to the stage to share a special moment with Swift herself mid-show: A tearful Milana gave the singer one of her friendship bracelets as they embraced to cheers from the crowd.

Originally published as Taylor Swift’s huge rule change for Aussie shows