Watch Taylor Swift Perform ‘Better Man’ Live for the First Time
During a pre-Super Bowl concert in Houston, Texas, on Saturday night (Feb. 4), Taylor Swift performed the song "Better Man" live for the first time ever. The country-turned-pop superstar wrote the song and gave it to Little Big Town, who released it as a single in late 2016.
Readers can press play above to see a snippet of Swift performing "Better Man" at Club Nomadic, a pop-up club that came to Houston specifically for Super Bowl LI festivities. She accompanied herself on acoustic guitar for the song, and four backup singers helped fill out the harmonies that Little Big Town brought to their version of the tune.
"I never really knew what it would feel like to hear my song on the radio and have someone else singing it. Turns out, it feels awesome," Swift told the crowd before singing "Better Man" (quote via Billboard). "I feel really grateful to the artists who have decided to record the things that I have written."
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"Better Man" is the first single from Little Big Town's forthcoming new album, The Breaker. The country quartet released the song in late October of 2016, but didn't reveal that Swift wrote the track until a few weeks later.
“She sent us this song, and it was one that was really special to her,” Karen Fairchild shares. “She thought of us because of the harmonies. She’s never pitched a song to anyone before, and the moment that we heard it, we were like, ‘Man, that is a song that we’re going to cut.’”
Adds Phillip Sweet, “Immediately, we all had the same reaction. We’ve always, through our whole career, every time we’ve had that reaction to a song, we knew it felt right … And we’ve known Taylor since she was in high school. She’s a dear friend of ours.”
“We played it for her when we finished it, and she was really, really excited,” Fairchild continues. “We said, ‘We’re not just going to blab this that you wrote this immediately,’ and she said, ‘That’s the greatest honor as a songwriter that you could give me, is that you don’t want anybody to know that I wrote this.'”
The Breaker is set for release on Feb. 24, the same day that Little Big Town will begin their Ryman Auditorium residency. As for Swift, she told the crowd at Club Nomadic, "As far as I know, I'm doing one show in 2017. And as far as I know, this is that one show."
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