Taylor Swift Closes the Academy Museum Gala with a Rare, Stripped-Back Set

Los Angeles — Taylor Swift brought the sixth annual Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Gala to a close on October 17 with something she has not done in a while: a short, intimate set backed by a live band.

It was, by multiple accounts, her first performance with a band since the Eras Tour ended in Vancouver in December 2024 — which turned four songs in a museum into a genuine event. Conan O’Brien introduced her at the gala, which honored John Carpenter, Colman Domingo and Charlize Theron and raised more than $14 million for the museum.

The setlist

Swift opened with “Blank Space,” the 2014 single that still works as a crowd-settler, then played the live debut of “The Fate of Ophelia” from her album The Life of a Showgirl — performed acoustically on guitar and introduced as its first-ever live airing. She followed with “I Knew It, I Knew You,” the song she wrote for the Toy Story 5 soundtrack, and closed on “Love Story,” the 2008 standard from Fearless.

• “Blank Space” (1989, 2014)
• “The Fate of Ophelia” — live debut, from The Life of a Showgirl
• “I Knew It, I Knew You” — from the Toy Story 5 soundtrack
• “Love Story” (Fearless, 2008)

After a tour built on spectacle, four songs and a guitar in a museum land as their own kind of statement.

Why a small show reads as a big deal

Swift spent two years on the largest tour in pop history, so the surprise here is the scale, not the setlist. A gala performance is close quarters by definition — a room, not a stadium — and debuting a new song acoustically in that setting is a deliberate change of register. It reads as an artist choosing intimacy on purpose after years of maximalism.

For the fans who spent the night refreshing clips, the detail that traveled furthest was simply that she sounded loose and happy. On the question of anything beyond the music — the personal-life chatter that attaches to any Swift appearance — reputable coverage of the night stuck to the performance, and so will we.