A Taylor Swift fan who failed to secure tickets to the singer’s Nashville Eras tour concert has revealed how he became a stadium security guard to see the show.
Davis Perrigo, who is based in Nashville, went viral online after fans spotted him in front of the Nissan Stadium stage as he sang along to some of Swift’s hit tunes, including “I Knew You Were Trouble”.
Speaking to The Independent, Perrigo explained that when he couldn’t get Eras tour tickets, he thought of another way to see her concert: Working at the stadium.
“My dad used to work as a security guard when I was a kid, so I thought that was a good way to get into the concert,” he said. “Basically, getting hired at the job was just filling out a form online.”
The Swiftie said that once he got the job, he didn’t have that many responsibilities at the concert. “They were pretty minimal,” he said. “It was just standing there and making sure people weren’t doing anything bad. And I never had any issues all night.”
Perrigo, who works as an accountant, noted that while fans there was dancing and singing along to the music, he got reprimanded for doing this on the job. However, he didn’t really take this to heart, as he only applied to be a security guard to see Swift.
“Taylor’s security people told my boss that I had to take it down a level. Be a little bit more solum, be a little bit more professional, but I didn’t care,” he said. “Working here is not any kind of career opportunity, it’s just when I want to have fun.”
Speaking to CNN, Perrigo emphasised that his main focus at Nissan Stadium was to see the “Anti-Hero” singer, during which he got as close to Swift as he ever “dreamed of being”.
“I could still do technically what my job was, but I could see it right at the corner of my eye, and I basically had like a front row seat to that,” he said. “It was awesome.”
He also shared that he couldn’t document the event himself: “You’re really not supposed to be on your phone at all. So I don’t have many pictures from that night that I took.”
While Perrigo couldn’t take videos from the event himself, his appearance at the concert quickly went viral with many fans capturing footage of him. On TikTok, fellow Swifties praised him for singing along to Swift’s songs and knowing most of the words. They also confessed that they “swooned” over him that evening and called him “adorable”.
Speaking to Nashville’s News Channel 5, the security guard said that he saved some of the viral TikTok videos of him on his phone as he was stunned by the fan response.
“I showed someone at work, I was like, ‘Look at this video, it’s got this video, it’s got 10,000 views.’ And then by that night, it was over one million. I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is out of control,” he said.
Similar to other fans, Perrigo was left without tickets in November 2022 when Ticketmater crashed within hours after Swift’s pre-sale tickets for her US Eras Tour went live. This instantly sparked backlash among fans who had waited in line for hours only to come up empty-handed. Soon after that, tickets remerged on resale sites for as much as $22,000.
Amid the Ticketmaster drama, Swift issued a statement out on Instagram, as the singer began by acknowledging that she’s “protective” of her fans.
“It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse,” she wrote to her Instagram Story, at the time.
She continued: “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really p***es me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
