Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour: The Pinnacle of Taylor on Her Own Terms

It’s a couple hours into the Eras Tour, and Taylor Swift is in agony.

Just for a split second. Just after remembering what it was like to live for the hope of it all — the breakpoint, when her hand moves up to cover her cheek, forehead, brush back through her blonde hair in frustration. The bittersweetness of “august” becomes the anger of “illicit affairs.” The expression on her face is so raw it hurts to look at. From 40 or 50 feet away, my sister and I turn automatically to each other, our faces a mirror of alarm so obvious we both laugh. The moment is peak Taylor Swift as an artist and performer: dramatic, paradoxically convincing and calculated, and endlessly capable of capturing something real under conditions of artifice.

Leading up to this tour, I’ve been thinking about transitions. Fans on TikTok have, too. What songs would she fuse together? We dreamed of cross-era mashups between “All Too Well” and “champagne problems,” “Maroon” and “The Moment I Knew.” However, early on night one of the Eras Tour in Glendale, Arizona — temporarily christened Swift City — Taylor revealed the show would instead be composed of individual album eras, each its own isolated block of performances. Threaded together across three hours and 15 minutes, they create a separate but parallel narrative to her discography: the albums aren’t ordered by time, but rather by a larger vision. Call it a rewriting of history. Call it a culmination of Taylor on her own terms.

Cue: “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” a seemingly baffling choice for an opening number, and her first time opening a tour with a non-single. Taylor rises amidst colorful flowing fabric, the orchestra swells, and she begins at the chorus: “It’s you and me/That’s my whole world/They whisper in the hallways she’s a bad, bad girl.” It’s all of Taylor’s evolutions as an artist and person wrapped up in one song. Her high school songwriting motifs, the preoccupation with what outsiders say about her, the eventual political awakening that inspired her to turn those love stories and high school dramas into metaphors for “disillusionment with our crazy world.” And of course, the title is shared with her Netflix documentary, one of the most revealing works yet about the person Taylor Swift is and the person Taylor Swift wants to be seen as.

In 2020, Taylor and Paul McCartney covered Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians issue and talked about live shows and how they craft a setlist. Taylor remembered seeing McCartney with her family, and how he played the hits, regardless of the thousands of times he’d played those songs before. “It was the most selfless set list I had ever seen,” she told him. “It was completely geared toward what it would thrill us to hear. It had new stuff, but it had every hit we wanted to hear, every song we’d ever cried to, every song people had gotten married to, or been brokenhearted to. And I just remembered thinking, ‘I’ve got to remember that,’ that you do that set list for your fans.”