Last Wednesday (October 27), at John F. Kennedy International Airport’s JetBlue Terminal 5 in New York, Taylor Swift performed in front of 1,500 fans.
Sitting quietly waiting for their flight to be called, passengers may have been intrigued by a makeshift stage built in an area usually reserved for baggage claims. A crowd massed in front of the stage, not sure what to expect.
So, when Taylor Swift suddenly appeared before a group of contest winners and their guests, and launched into the first of five songs, with her back-up musicians, the fans went wild.Swift, 20, who launched her third album, Speak Now, on Monday (October 25), took the stage in a red polka-dot dress and bellowed, “Hello New York, I’m Taylor,” before starting the performance with her hit You Belong With Me.
Swift then boarded a private plane with the contest winners and flew off to Los Angeles. The airport performance will be edited, mixed in with interviews, and broadcast to JetBlue’s 80,000 customers each day for the next two months.
Billboard has predicted that Speak Now could sell as many as 800,000-900,000 copies in the week following its release, easily besting the year’s biggest debut to date, Eminem’s Recovery, which sold 741,000 copies.