SINGAPORE: When the most popular pop singer reveals that she has a special connection to Singapore through her grandmother and mother, that’s just icing on the cake.
Not only is Singapore the only stop on Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, but she also said in her March 1 concert that her mom had spent some of her growing up years in the Little Red Dot. Ms Swift can be heard in the video below saying that she’s been hearing about Singapore all her life.
🎥 I Earlier at #SingaporeTSTheErasTour, Taylor Swift talked about her grandma and Singapore! ❤️ #TaylorSwiftErasTourSG
— Taylor Swift News (@DailyTSwiftNews) March 2, 2024
“My mom actually spent a lot of her childhood with her mom and dad and sister growing up in Singapore,” she said, adding:
“So a lot of the time when we’d come here on tour, my mom would take me and drive me past her old house, where she used to go to school.”
Swift had already revealed in 2016 that her mother, Andrea, had spent part some years in Singapore due to her own father’s job, which took him overseas.
“To get to come here and play a show this big with so many beautiful, generous people who are essentially honoring my family with what you just did with that song, it means the world,” she said on Friday night.
After she talked about her family’s ties to Singapore, it did not take long for internet sleuths to try and find out more about Swift’s grandmother, Marjorie Finlay.
Poet and writer Rick Koh Buck Song was one of the first to dig up some information about Swift’s Singapore connection, posting a photo of the singer’s grandmother’s car in Singapore with the license plate SM 8860 from the video of the song “Marjorie.”
“There’s one video clip that shows Marjorie leaving the porch of what looks definitely like a grand British colonial bungalow, somewhere in a place like Tanglin or Sembawang.
She then gets into a car whose licence plate is Singaporean, for sure, from its numbering system, and can be read clearly: ‘SM 8860’,” wrote Mr Koh.
He added that Marjorie had played “the soprano lead in a production of ‘The Bartered Bride’, an opera by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. The opera was staged at the Victoria Theatre over five nights,” citing a The Straits Times piece from 1968.
The pop superstar’s grandmother “performed all over the world, including in Venezuela, Cuba and Puerto Rico.”
He ended his post by asking the Land Transport Authority (LTA) if anyone in Singapore is using the plate number today and with an appeal to the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) for help identifying the location of this colonial bungalow. /TISG