Taylor Swift and Bon Iver: which Folklore song did duo perform at UK gig with The National’s Aaron Dessner?

Taylor Swift stole the show when she joined Bon Iver on stage at the OVO Arena in Wembley. The group performed “exile,” which is their collaboration from Swift’s 2020 album Folklore. As Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon began the first few verses of the song from the Midnights star’s eighth record, she walked on stage.

The National’s Aaron Dessner co-produced “exile” with Swift’s boyfriend Joe Alwyn, hence he enthusiastically accompanied them on stage. And it’s not the last time he collaborated with the singer-songwriter. They worked on the title track to Swift’s followup LP Evermore. In April 2021, Vernon teased an unreleased collaboration with Swift that would later appear on How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? the second album from Big Red Machine, his side project with Dessner and Anaïs Mitchell.

The 11 Grammy Award-winning Swift praised the duo, calling them “the most talented men in the world”. Vernon then joked that her performance would be hard to follow and “we don’t know what to do now”, then proceeded to play “Skinny Love” and “Blood Bank.”

What genre is the Midnights album?

Swift is well known for pursuing a large variety of genres throughout her career, including country, pop, folk and more, meaning that it was a very much guesswork to fans what genre the new album was going to be. However, her 10th album pursues a newly subdued and amorphous pop sound with synths.

Who produced Midnights by Taylor Swift?

This is Swift’s first album to be recorded entirely with Jack Antonoff, after nearly a decade of ever higher-profile collaborations. In the past, he has accentuated Swift’s ambitiously vivid storytelling with technicolour electronic pop, but has tried a moodier approach in this new LP.

How many copies did Midnights sell?

Swift released her latest album Midnights last week, which caused the music streaming platform Spotify to crash. Hours later, she shared seven more songs. Spotify confirmed that the song became the most streamed album in a single day for them, and Swift broke the record for the most-streamed artist in a single day in its history.

She responded: “How did I get this lucky, having you guys out here doing something this mind-blowing?! Like what even just happened??!?!”

According to data from Luminate, which provides figures for the Billboard charts, Swift has managed to shift 1.4 million units after just five days of Midnights’ release. The album has had the largest week for any album since Adele’s 25 debuted with 3.482 million in its first week in December 2015. And all 20 tracks registered more than 423 million on-demand official streams (audio and video combined) in the US since its release on 21 October. It is also the largest streaming week ever for an album by a non-R&B/hip-hop title, or for any album by a female artist.

Swift also released a second video for the song Bejeweled, which is a self-directed play based on Cinderella. It features countless easter eggs and cameos from Laura Dern (as her stepmother), Haim (as her stepsisters), Jack Antonoff, Dita Von Teese, and Pat McGrath, among others. In the video, instead of fitting into a glass slipper, the sisters have to attend a talent competition to win a marriage proposal from the prince.

While details are scarce, a UK tour itself has been confirmed by Taylor Nation, an official fan page for the singer that’s run by her team and who post updates and announcements about things like new music, tour dates and more. On 17 October, the Taylor Nation Twitter account wrote: “UK fans… we’d head to the store now if we were you [eyes emoji].”