This is the signature Swift humble-brag, modesty that has at times seemed so false that it earned its own meme, the Taylor Swift Surprised Face-a reference to the What? Me?! gasps of astonishment she unleashed once too often when her name was called at awards ceremonies. I didn’t always have 14,000 people wanting to hang out with me on a Saturday night.” 1 thing when I was little, because I didn’t have much of a social life going on. “I always wanted to know and I always used to daydream about what it would be like to stand on a really big stage and sing songs for a lot of people, songs that I had written … Daydreaming was kind of my No. Introducing “Mean,” a song about bullying, Swift stood at the lip of the stage, picking at a banjo. Yet the heart of a Taylor Swift show is intimacy: moments like the tissue break, when the razzle-dazzle recedes, the band and dancers step into the shadows, and Swift bathes cavernous arenas in a homey campfire glow. There are Jumbotrons and LED lights, multilevel stages and hydraulics and confetti drops, a seven-piece band, four backup singers, fifteen dancers, nearly as many costume changes. Swift’s Red tour is her biggest yet, and it has all the trappings of a stadium-pop blockbuster. Twenty seconds later, Swift was back onstage, strumming her twelve-string acoustic guitar and singing “Sparks Fly.” The crowd-14,000 plus, mostly female-erupted in a deafening, inhuman roar. Can you imagine imperial Beyoncé or imperious Lady Gaga telling a sold-out arena: Hang on a sec, I’ve gotta go snort into a napkin? But for Swift it was a coup de théâtre. “I swear I’m gonna do this really fast, can you please scream to fill the awkward silence, please?” She scurried down a flight of steps offstage, where, presumably, a roadie was waiting with Kleenex.įor another star, the move would be inconceivable: a mystique-shattering breach of the fourth wall. “I’m sorry, guys, but I just really have to blow my nose,” she said. About halfway through, she settled in front of a microphone to perform her 2010 hit “Sparks Fly.” Suddenly, she thought better of it. In fact, Swift’s cold had provided one of the show’s Kodak moments. “I found it a little bit easier to sing than to talk, which was, like, a miracle.” The concert the previous evening was the final one of the tour, and the toughest. She’d come home to Nashville to wrap up a seven-month-long North American tour in support of her fourth album, Red, which was released in October 2012. Swift had been sick all week, fighting the kind of head cold best treated by curling up in bed with a magnum of NyQuil. I didn’t cough on them, just so you know. “I made these, and I’m super-proud of them,” she said, pushing a plate of cookies across the counter. But when she spoke, what came out was a croak, a husky voice pitched about two octaves lower than Bea Arthur’s. She looked the picture of health: She greeted me in her big, open-plan kitchen, wearing a loose-fitting white-lace frock and friendly grin. When I arrived at her apartment later that day-my visit was scheduled-she was audibly under the weather. This was celebrity stalking at its most benign: The mom and daughter had a gift for Swift, a big container of homemade chicken soup, which they left with her doorman. On a Sunday morning in late September, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, who had flown to Nashville from Connecticut to see Swift’s concert at the Bridgestone Arena the night before, walked into the lobby of her building. But fans have a way of sniffing these things out. The singer has two other homes-a modest house, which she calls a “cottage,” in Beverly Hills, and her main residence, a penthouse apartment near downtown Nashville-and her team makes every effort to keep the addresses hush-hush. Police reportedly spotted him walking out of the ocean he told the arresting officers he had swum two miles to meet Taylor Swift. This spring, a man was arrested in the wee hours of the morning near her estate in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Taylor Swift worries a lot about security. Swift’s sold-out performance at MetLife Stadium in July.