Closing Out My 2024 Ukulele Project

Looking back on a year of the Taylor Swift Surprise Songs Sets

We’re in the final six weeks of the Taylor Swift Surprise Songs Project, my 2024 ukulele adventure where I play each acoustic set from the 2023 North American Eras Tour LIVE on Instagram each week.

When I came up with this idea forevermore ago (OK, back in January), I wanted to do it for accountability and practice — and mostly for fun, duh.

But I had no idea how much it would take over my life this year. Or how many feels I’m having now that I’m reaching the end game.

playing for a sold-out audience at Studio 9 at Porches

Yes, I am a much better ukulelist (or is it ukuleleist?) now than I was 11 months ago. I’m no longer afraid of the E chord, or the Gm, and can mostly sorta even do a Dbm chord. This is huge!

But the project has been more meaningful than the act of simply improving my mechanics.

It’s hard not to find it all a little bittersweet

Obviously I wouldn’t attempt something like this if I wasn’t already a Swiftie, but deeply listening to these songs while learning them has given me an even greater appreciation for Taylor’s catalog.

I’m particularly grateful to spend more time with the vault and bonus tracks from each of the (Taylor’s Version) re-releases, but it’s been wonderful to spend time with so many of the songs I sort of took for granted¹ in between my favorite bangers.

As someone who grew up in pre-Apple Music, pre-iPod days, I didn’t realize I missed obsessively playing a single album or mixtape over and over and over until I started doing it again here.

The project has also given me chances to stretch my creativity and meet challenges. How would highly produced, electronics-heavy reputation songs like “Call It What You Want” or “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” sound on ukulele, for example?

Taylor has said somewhere, and I am definitely paraphrasing, that she hopes her songs come through regardless of how they’re being performed — i.e., acoustically vs. with a full band or production.

I feel like I did fairly well interpreting them on ukulele as she did on acoustic guitar or piano, because good songwriting is good songwriting.

take me to the lakes!

I’ve also used the project as an excuse to play ukulele on our road trips this year. This might have annoyed my husband a tiny bit, but… he knows who he married².

So I got to play sets in Maine right before we saw the total solar eclipse, on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee, and most recently, in the gorgeous Studio 9 at Porches in North Adams, MA.

As happy as I am playing at home in my office, it’s really a thrill to do it out in the wild. So you might find me busking around New England or New Jersey in the near future.

And as Taylor’s Eras Tour comes to a close in a week and a half, I’ll be winding down my project nearly simultaneously. Hence the feels about this cosmic coincidence.

Even though I didn’t attend any Eras shows in person, and even though I’ve been doing this mostly for myself and my own sense of accomplishment, the whole experience has emotionally connected me and changed me.

It’s taken up so much brain and imagination space in a way I’ve felt never before and ever since.

And because I don’t want to let it go…

A home for the live performances here on Substack

I chose to play these sets as Instagram Lives because I wanted to get over my pathological people-pleaser perfectionist tendency to swear and start all over again if I made one little mistake in a song — and to get more comfortable with the idea of people seeing and hearing me play, even if it was through a phone screen.

But I realized quickly that my equally strong desire for posterity didn’t lend itself to the IG Live format.

So each live performance has been screen-recorded and saved here in a full archive for viewing at any time, whether or not you have an Instagram account. (They also sound much better when you’re not listening through a tiny phone speaker, FYI!)

I’ll be posting the final six sets here as they’re performed³, with the final set hitting on December 31, 2024.

My 2025 ukulele project

This was so much fun, I’ve decided to do it again next year!

The scope will be slightly different and some of you will breathe a sigh of relief that it won’t be Taylor Swift-focused (cue the teardrops on my guitar), but I’ll still be playing every week.

I’ll tell you all the details shortly, so stay tuned.

1. Admittedly, I have a few exceptions. “Last Kiss” and “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” I tried to pep you up, but it just didn’t work.

2. Yes, that’s a Hamilton reference. Because I can be obsessed with more than one musical phenomenon.

3. So you’ll be seeing more ukulele stuff in this newsletter feed. If it’s not your jam, just feel free to delete those emails. I assure you there will be lots of other stories coming your way.