Taylor Swift and Paramore’s Hayley Williams brought it back to the Speak Now era during the 14-time Grammy winner’s second Eras Tour concert in London.
Swift, 34, enlisted Williams, 35, for an acoustic rendition of their “Castles Crumbling (Taylor’s Version)” duet on Saturday, June 22, at Wembley Stadium. While Swift opted for her blue, high-low “surprise song” costume, Williams’ look paid tribute to the origins of their friendship.
Williams, whose band Paramore is the European opening act for Swift’s Eras Tour, rocked a lilac halter dress. The frock paid homage to Swift, who notably wore a purple minidress during her 2011 Speak Now world tour. Swift and Williams, who co-wrote “Castles Crumbling” as a vault track for the 2010 LP, even performed a duet on the road at the time.
“You had me come down a grand staircase,” Williams recalled on Saturday of their last touring duet. “I barely remember it!”
After the two women finished playing “Castles Crumbling” on Saturday, Swift noticed handwritten ink down Williams’ shoulder.
“This is a Speak Now tour thing,” Swift quipped with a laugh. “I always used to write Sharpie all down my arm.”
On Saturday, Williams wrote “I remember this moment” in cursive across her bicep, a nod to Swift’s “Long Live.” The track briefly appeared on Swift’s Eras Tour setlist following the July 2023 release of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) but has since been cut to make room for a Tortured Poets Department section after the album’s April debut.
Several hours after the concert, Williams shared an Instagram Story pic of Swift from the 2011 tour when she wore the OG purple dress and wrote “we all learn to make mistakes and run from them” down her arm.
During Swift’s Speak Now tour, she often wrote lyrics on her arm from other musicians instead of her own prose, choosing lines from artists including pal Selena Gomez, Andy Grammer, Alanis Morrissette and Faith Hill.
“I have written lyrics on my arm for the last tour, and it was really a fun thing to do because it could be a song I’d never heard before,” Swift told Taste of Country in October 2012. “It could be a song that somebody just said, ‘Oh here, I really like this one line in this one song,’ you know, in the dressing room before I’d go on, and I’d just write it on my arm!”
Swift revisited the trend in her “I Can See You” music video, which dropped in July 2023 alongside her re-recorded Speak Now LP, writing the “Long Live” lyrics on her arm.
