Remember When Taylor Swift Went Full Emo Performing ‘Haunted’ in 2010? We Do
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Long before she traded in country music for unstoppable pop stardom, there was a moment in time when Taylor Swift decided to go full emo. And it really was just a moment, particularly the mid-point of NBC‘s Thanksgiving Special: Taylor Swift – Speak Now in 2010, just one month after she released her third studio album Speak Now. Her nine-song setlist could have soundtracked a fairytale: There were dreamy renditions of “Sparks Fly” and “Enchanted,” but when she reached “Haunted,” Swift let the teenage angst that inspired it consume her completely.
This was nearly 13 years ago at this point, so most of the footage from the performance scattered across YouTube does in fact look like it was recorded using a microwave. But the emotion in Swift’s vocals, soaked in pure devastation at the loss of a love that was supposed to last forever, still cuts deep.
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“‘Haunted’ is about the moment that you realize the person you’re in love with is drifting and fading fast. And you don’t know what to do, but in that period of time, in that phase of love, where it’s fading out, time moves so slowly,” Swift explained in an old post on her website. “Everything hinges on what that last text message said, and you’re realizing that he’s kind of falling out of love. That’s a really heartbreaking and tragic thing to go through, because the whole time you’re trying to tell yourself it’s not happening. I went through this, and I ended up waking up in the middle of the night writing this song about it.”
Backed by a full band, including a complete string section bringing the song’s orchestral highlights to the forefront, the “Haunted” performance was like the singer’s own short and sweet rock opera. “I wanted the music and the orchestration to reflect the intensity of the emotion the song is about, so we recorded strings with Paul Buckmaster at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles,” Swift added. “It was an amazing experience – recording this entire big, live string section that I think in the end really captured the intense, chaotic feeling of confusion I was looking for.”
And it wasn’t only emo in its sound. The performance was filmed at the Psycho House on the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot. 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s horror thriller Psycho, so Swift thought it would be the perfect location to bring her own romantic nightmare to life.
With the arrival of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), out July 7 as the third in her series of re-recordings, Swift is unleashing some more skeletons from her closet, or in this case her vault of previously unreleased songs from that album era. The records will feature appearances from emo royalty Fall Out Boy and Paramore’s Hayley Williams on “Electric Touch” and “Castles Crumbling,” respectively.
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