https://youtube.com/watch?v=dg5YXGiqXKw
Ah, the beauty of live performance. Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran persevered through technical difficulties during their performance at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. on Wednesday, March 27, but the musical pros soldiered on to deliver a successful night. The show was one of Swift’s stops on her Red tour with guest performer Sheeran.
Sheeran kicked off the musical evening with a stellar 40-minute opening set with a number of his own tracks, including hit “The A Team.”
The pair took to the stage toward the end of the show to perform their duet “Everything Has Changed” together, but early on in the song, Sheeran, 22, seemed to be struggling with his ear piece.
When it eventually did pop out (watch the moment happen around 0:48 in the video clip above), the two singers fell out of sync with one another, with a short gap forming between Swift’s vocals and Sheeran’s.
Swift, 23, attempted to remedy the issue by leaning away from the mic to ask a crew member to fix the situation, but not before the backing track appeared to play a few notes of her voice and Sheeran’s, as well as their guitars strumming.
At one point in the video, the poised pop star acknowledged the problem head-on with the cheering crowd, yelling, “Live shows, ladies and gentlemen. Give it up for Ed Sheeran, who’s still playing even after his in-ears went out!”
A member of the crew finally brought Sheeran a new earpiece for the remainder of the song, an eyewitness tells Us, though the song was close to over by then.
“My earpiece fell out. I couldn’t hear in time with the music,” Sheeran later told Us over lunch at the Rolling Stone/Us Weekly offices on Thursday, March 28. “I was worried about it but these things happen. We’ll move on.”
Not that the show suffered from that minor technical hiccup, however. Swift performed an impressive two-hour set, including a dubstep-remix of “I Knew You Were Trouble,” latest single “22,” and her mega-smash “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” — complete with a burst of confetti at the end.
“I am so excited for you to see the show,” Swift told Us backstage before the show. “I have been working so hard on it and am so proud of it.”
