The biggest littlest show on Earth

Eras tour, you are the loml

Welcome to Swiftian Theory, the newsletter about Taylor Swift. Writing for you today: Satu.

Photo courtesy of Ellie Bird

What I’ll always remember about the Eras tour is that we did it together. This started before the show even got on the road. The story began with scheming to get pre-sale codes for an imaginary tour that hadn’t even been announced yet. When she announced the theme of the tour, a look back at all her previous eras, I can’t lie, I was disappointed. LoverFest had felt like something different, because it was rumoured to be a kind of Taylor Swift Experience. I remember doing what Swifties do best and reading too much into an absence of information. Would we get an array of selected popstars, some sort of funfair (?) and other surprises? In comparison, a “greatest hits” tour felt trad. It even hinted at her becoming a legacy artist and going away for a while. Are you sure you’ve got it right this time Taylor?

Obviously I am always wrong and Taylor is always right. Having to come back and be our top popstar again after a shatteringly weird time, our centrist queen bet on a tour that felt familiar and instead of innovating with stagecraft, expanded the idea of a “tour” in scale and scope. Doing what she did best, she kept it light. Eras wasn’t the most visually spectacular tour I’ve ever seen (Beyoncé’s flying horse was more jaw-dropping and her costumes were insane). The Eras sets were nice, the costumes were pretty dresses and glittery leotards, it was cool when Taylor dived into the stage. After the Ticketmaster drama, arriving during daylight to just… watch a show felt strange and underwhelming. Wasn’t this supposed to be the most epic thing ever? How could the show match the grandeur of my/our love for this artist?

I had somehow forgotten that what Taylor does best is intimacy. Famously, intimacy isn’t the greatest show on earth, until it is. She speaks, and sings, at a comfortable conversational level. She doesn’t overwhelm you but she’s always there. Sometimes, incredibly, it was just her onstage. You don’t notice how powerful the lack of unnecessary frills is until you snap out of it and realise you’ve been mesmerised by a woman just walking around the stage singing Delicate. You especially notice it when other popstars without her stage presence try it. She’s an unbothered star quietly performing nuclear fusion.

That consistent display of heat and light goes for the individual show, where Taylor kept up the same energy level for the length of a marathon, and for the whole length of the Eras tour. I went to the tour but I don’t think you had to score tickets to feel this way: at some point Eras became like an institution, like going round your parents for Sunday lunch or listening to Radio 4. It’s always been there; it always will be. Through an altruistic avalanche of effort by Swifties across the world, you could watch a livestream most nights of the week. People talk about how our phones have made the world a more chilly and alienated place, but this was the personal, human internet at work. Citizens of the Taylor Swift global village:

• made a search engine for decoding cryptic friendship bracelets.

• tracked which off-tracklist songs she had played from each album, and I became convinced there was a pattern and she would play Mary’s Song at my shows (she didn’t).

• made the Swift Alert app, which pointed you in the direction of quality livestreams and reminded you when your favourite section was about to start.

• invented live guessing games while watching the show, like “what secret songs will she play?” and “which variation of the 1989 skater skirt set will she wear?”

I sent my first ever “TikTok gift” to someone hosting a livestream, a surreal experience as I think I sent them a duck. It felt like a way into a new ecosystem I wouldn’t have otherwise touched, with younger Swifties as my guide. Those streamers, who held up their phones (some with more finesse than others) so people at home could watch the show, are the unsung heroes of Taylor’s increased fame and reach. Without this access, the tour wouldn’t have felt ever-present, dip-into-able. It was so comforting knowing it was there. I was watching when Travis came onstage dressed as a TTPD dancer. I probably threw a duck in joy. And like watching the Olympics opening ceremony, I loved the feeling that we were all there together, for once.

Now that the tour is over, I’m missing what I had. We’re all, globally, generally nostalgic for a probably-imaginary sense of community. Unlike a lot of communities, you didn’t have to give more than you wanted to be allowed access to the world of Eras. It was the lowest stakes secret society ever. I’ve had more conversations about Taylor on public transport this year than any other category of discourse with strangers. You can also just do a meaningful nod and smile. There’s so many of us, and it’s such a gentle pleasure to share. And you don’t have to be obsessed to be part of it. Sometimes people apologetically tell me that they merely like her and are not “Swifties”. I’m as happy to talk about what she wore to the VMAs as I am the time signature of Closure or whether she was in the box.

The fact that it felt so good to belong shows how much I’m missing that feeling these days. The pure breezy fun of the show also showed how stressed I basically am all the time. Can you relate? I can’t remember ever feeling as light and free as I did during my Eras shows, even during the post-Wembley crush. I was not responsible for anything but dancing. I was completely present, not worrying about the past or the future. When Taylor sang Lover and I sang “can I go where you go? Can we always be this close?” I was only thinking about her and how much I love stanning her and was not concerned with a single material problem of my life or anyone else’s. I’m so grateful to have an example of pure joy and non-being to refer back to. I want to feel that way as often as possible. Fortunately reminders are just one Spotify click away at all times. But I’m sad it’s over. No more livestreams to join, no more fuel for group chats with people I only met one time at a concert, no more reason to see flurries of ducks being thrown at TikTok streamers, no facetimes from concerts during my favourite song, no more no more no more.

I’ve personally loved the media blitz around the tour. Taylor has a major knack for creating media interest that has apparently maddened plenty of other people, even though it’s heaven for Swifties to follow someone who is so active and willing to be a good old-fashioned celebrity. My theory is that Taylor doesn’t “suck the oxygen out of the room”. She doesn’t obliterate interest in other artists, even though her popularity means she powers something like 2% of all music consumption. I’m reasonably sure her main competition is not even other singers but other forms of entertainment. I think a lot of people at the tour (and listening to her music to the point where I’m now a minor-league Spotify listener) wouldn’t actively choose music if it wasn’t her.

Taylor’s fandom has grown exponentially during this tour, welcoming new converts just as passionate but arriving with their own reasons for being here, including just wanting to be part of the hype and people who like American football. I think we’ll now winterize and retract back. The active fandom will get smaller and we’ll mainly run on speculation about Rep TV and a new album for a bit. My hysteria never subsides but I guess we’ll all have to heal our nervous systems to some extent. There’s no wrong way to be a Taylor fan but I didn’t like seeing social anxiety spread across TikTok as kids worried about whether their outfits would be good enough, and I Really Didn’t Like hearing about pushing and verbal bullying in the front standing area. Taylor couldn’t be more clear in her songs that she feels outside a lot of the time, alone, the cringe one, the monster on the hill. If there’s one aspect of the fandom I feel uneasy about, it’s the idea that you could look at Taylor and simply see a beautiful blonde, one of life’s obvious winners and think, well I’d like to be an insider in that club, I think I’ll trample one of my fellow fans to get a fraction closer to the Queen Bee. Surely when you think about it for a second, a live tour is your chance to melt into the collective, to succumb to being one person among tens of thousands. It takes the pressure off being a human being. That anonymity allows us to scream at the top of our lungs because everyone is. Being a Swiftie has been sort of inherently embarassing for a long time, even though I’m actually very proud to be one and I feel very connected to other Taylor fans. The idea of it being a status thing feels ludicrous. This is just part of being in a community I guess. We don’t all have to like each other, but we do have to get along. If I learned one thing this year it’s that being a Taylor fan isn’t about what goes on in your head. You don’t have to know anything, or be anything. You’ve just got to feel it.

We felt it. But now the confetti falls to the ground. Now we put our friendship bracelets into a box so they don’t get dusty. The grey quarter-zip I bought at the Edinburgh show and wore on the long, rainy walk home from Murrayfield with Natasha as we dissected everything we’d just seen and heard, I just wear it around the house now. It will be legacy merch at the next tour, worn to prove I was there. The kids I know who were too young for this tour will finally get to go and I’ll be really annoying about how good Eras was. Taylor is always on some new shit so it’s not really grief I’m feeling – releasing TTPD mid-tour was a reminder that this wasn’t a greatest hits tour after all because there’s more greatness on its way, a constant conveyor belt of astonishing greatness. And her last secret song medley baited us the way she loves to do. Everyone was crying over Long Live and New Year’s Day, the after-party songs. But she included The Manuscript to remind us of a few things: “the story isn’t mine anymore” because we did the alchemical magic on her songs that takes them from bedroom musings to collective ownership (Swiftie socialism). And of course the song’s cinematic imagery (“the tears fell in synchronicity with the score / And at last she knew what the agony had been for”) reminds us she’s working on her movie. My god, we have the time of our lives, with her.

If you like reading about Taylor Swift, you may like my book, Into the Taylor-Verse.