Watch Mike Portnoy rip through Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’ after hearing it for the first time

Dream Theater‘s Mike Portnoy has created his own drum parts for Taylor Swift‘s ‘Shake It Off’ after listening to it for the first time – check it out below.

As part of drumming platform Drumeo’s popular First Time series, the channel challenged the veteran prog metal drummer to create his own parts for a song he had never heard before – which turned out to be Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’.

After listening to a snippet of the track – which was played to him without drum tracks – Portnoy dove right into jamming along to the song during his first listen. After his first listen, Portnoy joked that it “sounded like something out of Disneyland in Japan or something” before confirming that he did not know the song, or that it was from Taylor Swift.

While listening to the song one more time, Portnoy said he didn’t know how to write a chart for the song because “it’s like Bob Dylan. It’s all verses, it doesn’t change keys. I don’t even know what to write. I’m just going to jam to it, I guess.”

After ripping through his second take – complete with blistering fills and double-bass, Portnoy was then told what song it was and who had performed it. He replied: “Oh my god! That’s Taylor Swift? Only the biggest artist on Earth. I had no idea.”

He continued: “Taylor, I’m really sorry. I still would play with you in a heartbeat, but I wouldn’t do that [drum pattern].” Later, he joked with the Drumeo team: “See, now I can’t say I’ve never heard a Taylor Swift song. You’ve just fucking ruined that for me.”

Taylor Swift recently wrapped her all-conquering ‘Eras’ World Tour with the final show in Vancouver on December 8, the highest-grossing tour of 2024 – beating off competition from Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Madonna and more.

The tour ran for a combined total of 21 months across 149 shows, and broke the record for the highest-grossing tour of all time, bringing in a reported $2.2billion (£1.73b) in total. She then attended an ‘Eras’ tour-themed party thrown for her by her boyfriend and NFL star Travis Kelce, in which guests dressed as the different ‘Eras’ of her career.

In other news, it has been revealed that Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ was the biggest-selling vinyl album in the UK in 2024. It marked the third consecutive year the singer topped the list, having done so with ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ in 2023 and ‘Midnights’ in 2022.

As for Mike Portnoy, he and Dream Theater will release the anticipated album ‘Parasomnia’, which is due for release on February 7. It’ll mark their first record with founding member Portnoy since 2009’s ‘Dark Clouds & Silver Linings’ after he rejoined the band in late 2023.