As it turns out, the opening night of the Eras Tour wasn’t the first time Taylor Swift performed for three hours straight. According to her former neighbor, pro wrestler Jeff Jarrett, the pop star once played an equally long private concert for his family to cheer them up during a tough time.
According to People, the WWE star recently told TMZ Sports that — back when he lived next to the Swift family in Hendersonville, Tenn. — the 14-time Grammy winner once came over to hang out with his kids shortly before his wife died of breast cancer in 2007. “It was Christmas of 2006,” he recalled. “My first wife [Jill Gregory] was really ill with breast cancer.”
“She passed away about five months after this, so she was really ill,” he continued, according to the publication. “Obviously, like every little girl in America, my daughters were big Taylor fans, and her songs had just kind of broke, but she was a hometown girl.”
When she initially showed up for a visit, Jarrett says that his children urged Swift to run back home and grab her guitar because they “wanted her to sing and play.”
“By the end of the afternoon, Taylor played about three hours,” he added, noting that by the time she was finished, about 45 people had gathered in his home just to watch her perform.
The showcase wound up being good practice for Swift’s global Eras Tour more than 15 years later, on which the singer played for more than three hours on a nightly basis. The grueling trek would end up inspiring the concept for her next album, The Life of a Showgirl, which drops Oct. 3.
Swift first announced the project through an appearance on then-boyfriend Travis Kelce’s New Heights podcast. A couple of weeks later, the couple revealed their engagement — about which Jarrett told TMZ Sports that he was happy for his family friend and couldn’t wait to see her welcome kids of her own someday.
But before all of that, Swift was just the girl next door who babysat Jarrett’s daughters, one of whom starred in the hitmaker’s “Mine” music video in 2010. In an interview last year, the wrestler recalled, “Taylor was like a big sister and came over and took the girls, baking cookies and just kinda hung out at the house.”
“I can’t say enough good things about Taylor,” he added at the time. “Just a sweetheart. I still call her ‘our girl’ and now she’s hanging out in the NFL circles.”