Music Review: Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift

Burswood Dome

Friday, March 2

Welcome to the enchanted garden world of Taylor Swift. It's a fearless place filled with sparkles, light, positivity and hope in the wake of broken hearts.

After a set by openers Hot Chelle Rae, the 22-year-old American country-pop superstar was everything her fans wanted her to be: pretty, polite, chatty, friendly and utterly endearing. She even threw in a few hours of singing.

As Swift explained, her songs seem to revel in the first blush of a relationship or lament it falling apart. No secret, either, that she's written about the relationships with singer Joe Jonas, actors Taylor Lautner and Jake Gyllenhaal and apparently even John Mayer. Hearing songs like the moving Dear John, Last Kiss and a dramatic Better Than Revenge leave you in no doubt about both the depth of her feeling and her ability to write a song which speaks to her audience.

On the 99th show of her Speak Now world tour and the first in Australia, she proudly proclaimed a personal life milestone of a debut dip in the Indian Ocean. This was also the kind of night where the crowd were as worth watching as the main event. Young girls with glittery shoes and butterflies in their hair, teens with 13 (Swift's lucky number) on their hands and words written up their arms, homemade shirts and dresses copied from the singer's wardrobe - they were all there.

Mostly it was mum with her teen and tween daughters but props to the dads who braved the night-long screaming and seemed to enjoy the show, too. There were even a couple of Chaperone Dad T-shirts about.

Backed by a sizeable and kick-arse band which included a fiddle and mandolin, Taylor also showed she was no slouch on the guitar, piano, banjo and ukulele.

The ever-morphing set was something to marvel at as it swapped from a church for You Belong With Me to the set of a classical ballet, offered up a large couch for everyone to perch on to ! play and turned into an old factory for the tap-dancing floor sweeper. There was a white grand piano at one point, a harp and a number of liberty bells which when raised, revealed aerial acrobats on bungee ropes. Confetti fell and pyros popped. A troupe of dancers (who had just about as many costume changes as Swift did) opted very much for 50s and 60s-themed costumes and moves for much of the night.

No doubt the audience would have picked their favourite songs as the highlights of the show, or when the singer flew through the air on a balcony while singing Love Story, or even when she sat under a gently rotating tree playing the ukulele on Fearless, complete with a line of Jason Mraz's I'm Yours thrown in. Hits aside, it was really hard to go past the always red-lipsticked Swift strapping on a banjo early on in the set for Our Song and a serious dose of musicality.

"I happen to like it when people are nice and when they do nice things," she said during one of her numerous heart-to-hearts with the 16,000-strong crowd. Then she launched into Mean.

The Story of Us was fun and Fifteen, a song written at that age, almost brought the roof down. There were odd awkward moments when Swift looked more like she was on a catwalk than on a concert stage and there was just a bit too much theatre, but her ability to entertain more than made up for it.

The show may have been a little long for her younger fans and a little late even on a Friday night, but this was easily forgiven simply because Taylor Swift is adorable, quite magical and just that little bit untouchable.