Illuminated on the hundred-foot screen was a timer with every second emphasized by the rattling of friendship bracelets and stomping of cowboy boots in the Raymond James Stadium. The sun was just beginning to set, casting the nearly 70,000 people in a golden glow, creating the warmest and most electric energy that’s only fitting for Taylor’s ethereal reveal from behind an array of colored, curved tapestry’s à la Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
Swift opened the three-hour show with Lover deep cut and fan favorite “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince ”, singing to her nearly two-decade legion of loyal devotees who are seeing her live on tour for the first time since the 2018 Reputation tour. Since then, Swift has duplicated her discography, having released six albums after Reputation, five of them being in the throes of and aftermath of the pandemic, leaving Swift with an overwhelming amount of music that has never been performed live. Henceforth, Swift opening her staggering forty-four-song setlist with “It’s you and me, that’s my whole world”, perfectly encapsulates her and the fans’ mutual desire for live music once again, something Swift expands on later in the night saying “So when I was writing evermore, it was the second album that I made in the pandemic, and it was still during a period of time when we didn’t know what the future of live music was. It was all very up in the air. And so I was just making music, trying not to think about those really scary questions, because I do need you guys, very much, for my well-being.”
Taylor Swift has been an ever changing, genre-bending —a mirrorball if you will— force in the music industry for seventeen years and traveling through her music one era at a time (justice for debut and Speak Now!) is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Swift has been vocal about the fear many women in the music industry face: aging, and the downfalls that come with no longer being the shiny new artist on the scene, “…the realizations I’m having at this point in my life, is just how lucky I am to have gotten to do this as long as you’ve allowed me to do this. I’m 33, so in pop star years, that’s 174,” she remarked in Arlington. So to be one of the shining lights in a crowd of nearly 70,000 people as Swift undoubtedly enters her prime almost twenty years later, was very special.
One of the most special moments for me was the evermore era, in which Swift transforms into a fiery warm spirit who sits at a mossy piano singing “champagne problems”, climbs across a dining table, pouring her heart out to an uninterested lover during “tolerate it”, and sings a tribute to her late grandmother with “marjorie”, during which her grandmother’s actual vocals are layered alongside her iconic granddaughter.
Another standout is of course, “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”, a 2012 album cut that has grown to be one of her most acclaimed singles, commonly referred to as her magnum opus. For ten minutes the stadium is coated in ruby as they belt Swift’s self-proclaimed life-altering early-twenties heartbreak back to her. “I would feel a lot of pain when singing it. And then I would sing it with you, and you’d sing it back so passionately, that it was so incredibly transformative to see that you related to what I was singing, and that I wasn’t alone in that, that all of a sudden, performing it didn’t hurt me anymore. It felt like it was about us. Do you know what I mean? I think that’s happened—I think you’ve done that for every song ever since. You’ve redefined it and made it ours.”
The Eras Tour was an incredible experience and further solidified Taylor Swift as one of music’s greatest lyricists and performers. Anyone doubting that can easily be shut down by the fact that three sold-out nights at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium, which holds 69,218 people, totaling over two hundred thousand people, still wasn’t enough to accommodate Swift’s demand as the concert expanded from the stadium and into the parking lot where dozens of people stood in the chances to hear the concert from outside.
One could go on for hours about the magnitude of Taylor Swift, yet the Eras Tour was also incredibly intimate, probably Swift’s strongest attribute in regard to her longevity. I went with four of my friends and we spent the day listening to her music, making friendship bracelets, and dusting our faces in glitter. It was a frivolous joy I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Everyone who bravely faced the monster that is Ticketmaster can say it was surely worth it.