What Taylor Swift’s featured artists have said about The Eras Tour and Swift herself

Taylor Swift is taking over cities and stadiums with The Eras Tour, and she’s brought some major artists along with her.
During each show, she has a segment where she performs two “surprise songs,” and she’s brought some artists and collaborators onstage to join her for some of those performances.
Here’s what her opening artists have said about the pop star and the experience of joining her on tour.
Swift recently released a remix version of her song “Karma,” featuring rapper Ice Spice, and the weekend after it was released, she brought Ice Spice onstage to perform the song with her in the set. During the New Jersey show, they also released a new music video of the song the two created.
In response to the announcement of the remix, Ice Spice tweeted, “sweetest person ever thank u sm i love yuuuu.”
Jack Antonoff has produced multiple albums for Swift, including her most recent studio album — “Midnights.” He also appeared alongside her in the film “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions,” released on Disney+ in November 2020, where he discusses with her the thought and meaning behind each song on her album “Folklore.” He joined her onstage to perform “Getaway Car” on May 26 in New Jersey.
“I’ve seen her change the music industry first-hand,” Antonoff told NME about Swift. “She’s amazing for being a champion, and making things better for the generations to come. She has a long history of rightly exposing some real darkness in the music industry. And I’m personally thankful for it, outside of our friendship and working relationship, just as an artist.”
Aaron Dessner, known for The National, teamed up to work with Swift to co-produce her last three albums and to create songs. During her last night performing in Nashville, Swift brought Dessner onstage to perform “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” with her from her “Midnights” album. He also joined her onstage to perform “The Great War,” “You’re On Your Own Kid” and “mad woman” in Tampa, Florida.
“I learn a lot from Taylor because she’s so talented, so hardworking and so sharp in her ideas, storytelling and sense of melody and rhythm,” Dessner told NME in 2021. He added, “She can carve into something in such a powerful, beautiful, incisive way that it does kind of give you… her approach to songwriting structurally, you just can’t help but be influenced by it because it’s so masterful.”
Swift shocked and delighted fans at the fourth show on The Eras Tour by bringing out Marcus Mumford, the Mumford and Sons frontman, to join her in performing “Cowboy Like Me,” and she also revealed that Mumford’s home studio is where she recorded the song for the “Evermore” album during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m going to play a Taylor Swift song for three reasons,” Mumford announced during Austin City Limits Music Festival in October, per Austin American-Statesman. “One, Taylor Swift’s awesome. Two, it’s a great song. And three, I sang on it, so I think I’m entitled.”
When Swift released her first re-release of an original album, she featured country singer Maren Morris on track 21 for “You All Over Me.” It was a song Swift had written at the time of the album release but was not included in the original version. During one of her performances in Chicago, she announced Morris would be joining her onstage, telling the crowd they were “so very lucky.”
“She’s one of my favorite artists. I just cannot wait to watch everything she does for the rest of her career. Everything she does is so thoughtful, and so brilliant,” Swift said, per Entertainment Tonight.
“We finally got to play ‘You All Over Me’ and I won’t ever be shutting up about it. Love you @taylorswift and love you always, Chicago,” Morris wrote in an Instagram post following the show.
Known for her own original songwriting, Phoebe Bridgers not only opened for Swift during seven shows on The Eras Tour, but Swift also brought Bridgers onstage during her set to perform “Nothing New” together. The two artists collaborated on the song about the fear of becoming irrelevant with age, which draws parallels between the two as female artists with a seven-year age gap.
“I remember blacking out reading the text because we’d never met or interacted in any way, so to be asked as our first interaction was crazy.” Bridgers told The Guardian about being asked to collaborate with Swift on the song.
The music duo wrote a song together called “Us” earlier this year for track X on Gracie Abrams’ latest album “The Secret of Us.” Abrams has been vocal in the past about being a fan of Swift’s ever since childhood.
“Every formative memory in my life is paired with a Taylor Swift song that helped me get through,” she told Vanity Fair. “My boyfriend the other day did the thing where we shuffled her discography and played a song for one second … I got them all.”
Years later, Abrams and Swift spent a late night together writing “Us” in Swift’s New York city apartment— “a night in which they started a fire, not just because of the music,” Deseret News reported.
“Writing this entire song from 2am to 6am was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. @taylorswift now we know how to use a fire extinguisher. I love you,” Abrams wrote on an Instagram post.
Sheeran has been a go-to collaborative artist for Swift ever since 2014.
Swift brought Sheeran onstage during one of The Eras Tour shows in London where they mashed up two of the songs they have collaborated on together — “Everything Has Changed” and “End Game,” along with Sheeran’s hit “Thinking Out Loud.”
“I have long, long, long conversations with Taylor about stuff just because I feel like she’s one of the only people that actually truly understands where I’m at,” Sheeran told CNN. “Because she’s solo artist, she’s stadiums.”
Here are all the collaborations the musical pair have created and released together so far: