Taylor Swift Is Coming Back to the CMA Awards Stage After 13 Years

Taylor Swift is going back to where it all started.

The singer will perform at the 60th annual CMA Awards on Wednesday, November 18, at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. It will be her first performance at country music's biggest night in 13 years. The Country Music Association and ABC announced the news on Friday, November 13 — a date Swift's fans did not miss, since 13 has been her lucky number for her entire career.

Swift last sang at the CMA Awards in 2013, when she delivered an acoustic version of "Red" alongside Alison Krauss and Vince Gill. She was 23 then, already a global pop star in the making but still rooted in the Nashville scene that raised her. Thirteen years later, she returns as a 14-time Grammy winner and one of the most powerful figures in music, to a ceremony marking its 60th anniversary.

The announcement came on Good Morning America on Friday morning, and Swift's team confirmed it within minutes. ABC posted the news on Instagram with a line that read like a dare to anyone who doubted it: "For the first time in 13 years, @taylorswift returns to perform LIVE on Country Music's Biggest Night!"

Nobody knows yet what she will sing. Organizers have not said which song she plans to perform, and Swift has not hinted at it either. Fans spent Friday trading guesses online, with many betting she will perform the song that earned her a nomination this year.

Swift is up for Single of the Year for "I Knew It, I Knew You," an original song she wrote for Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5. She wrote and produced it with Jack Antonoff, her longtime collaborator, and it was engineered by Laura Sisk. The nomination is her 26th at the CMA Awards and her first in four years. The song reached No. 1 on U.S. country radio earlier this year — her first song to top that chart in 13 years.

She has won CMA Entertainer of the Year twice and delivered eight performances across seven ceremonies. She first appeared at the event 20 years ago, the same year her self-titled debut album came out. She confirmed back in September, in an Instagram Stories post, that she would attend this year's ceremony — her first appearance at the show in 10 years. At the time she wrote, "LOOKS LIKE I HAVEN'T YEE'D MY LAST HAW THANK YOU CMA!!!! See you there Nov. 18."

The timing fits a year in which Swift has been leaning back into her Nashville roots. On October 26, she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, where she spoke about the Music Row writing sessions that shaped her as a teenager and celebrated the 20th anniversary of her debut album. The CMA performance lands less than a month later, in the same city, on the same stage where she collected her first major awards.

Lainey Wilson will host the ceremony for a third consecutive year. The show airs live from 8 to 11 p.m. ET on ABC and Disney+, and will be available to stream on Hulu the next day. For Swift, the return is a homecoming: she left country music behind a decade ago and built the biggest pop career on the planet. Whether she sings the Toy Story song, an old favorite, or something nobody expects, the audience in Bridgestone Arena will be watching a singer who started on that stage return to it on her own terms.