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    How Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Conquered the World

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    The pop star’s record-breaking, career-spanning show has dominated the summer, commanding attention and whipping up demand at a level thought unachievable in a fragmented age.As Taylor Swift rolled into Los Angeles this week, the frenzy surrounding her record-breaking Eras Tour was already in high gear.Headlines gushed that she had given $100,000 bonuses to her crew. Politicians asked her to postpone her concerts in solidarity with striking hotel workers. Scalped tickets were going for $3,000 and up. And there were way, way too many friendship bracelets to count.These days, the center of an otherwise splintered music world can only be Taylor Swift.The pop superstar’s tour, which is now finishing its initial North American leg with six nights at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, has been a both a business and a cultural juggernaut. Swift’s catalog of generation-defining hits and canny marketing sense have helped her achieve a level of white-hot demand and media saturation not seen since the 1980s heyday of Michael Jackson and Madonna — a dominance that the entertainment business had largely accepted as impossible to replicate in the fragmented 21st century.“The only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon of Beatlemania,” said Billy Joel, who attended Swift’s show in Tampa, Fla., with his wife and young daughters.In a summer of tours by stars like Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Morgan Wallen and Drake, Swift’s stands apart, in numbers and in media noise. Although Swift, 33, and her promoters do not publicly report box-office figures, the trade publication Pollstar estimated that she has been selling about $14 million in tickets each night. By the end of the full world tour, which is booked with 146 stadium dates well into 2024, Swift’s sales could reach $1.4 billion or more — exceeding Elton John’s $939 million for his multiyear farewell tour, the current record-holder.Swift has now had more No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 over the course of her career than any other woman, surpassing Barbra Streisand. With the tour lifting Swift’s entire body of work, she has placed 10 albums on that chart this year and is the first living artist since the trumpeter and bandleader Herb Alpert in 1966 to have four titles in the Top 10 at the same time.“It’s a pretty amazing feat,” Alpert, 88, said in a phone interview. “With the way radio is these days, and the way music is distributed, with streaming, I didn’t think anyone in this era could do it.”But how did a concert tour become so much more: fodder for gossip columns, the subject of weather reports, a boon for friendship-bracelet beads — the unofficial currency of Swiftie fandom — and the reason nobody could get a hotel room in Cincinnati at the end of June?“She is the best C.E.O., and best chief marketing officer, in the history of music,” said Nathan Hubbard, a longtime music and ticketing executive who co-hosts a Swift podcast. “She is following people like Bono, Jay-Z and Madonna, who were acutely aware of their brands. But of all of them, Taylor is the first one to be natively online.”Swift on the opening night of her Eras Tour in Glendale, Ariz., on March 17.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesSwifties have chronicled the stream of celebrity fans who have turned up each night: Julia Roberts, the New York Jets’ new quarterback Aaron Rodgers, even Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. But Swift has also made each show a news event by adding two “surprise songs,” often with headline-grabbing guests. On the July day that she put out a music video featuring Taylor Lautner, an ex-boyfriend, the actor backflipped across the stage in Kansas City, Mo., and paid Swift effusive tribute — “not just for the singer you are,” Lautner said, “but for the human you are.” The crowd registered its approval with an earsplitting roar.The Taylorpalooza extends to every level of the news media, which began the coverage cycle by chronicling Swift’s ticketing fiasco last November, when fans — and scalpers’ bots — crushed Ticketmaster’s systems, leading to a heated Senate Judiciary hearing. Since then, seemingly no nugget of Swift news has escaped coverage, from the stars in the stands to oddities like a Seattle concert that, according to one researcher, shook the ground with an intensity equivalent to a 2.3-magnitude earthquake.Music critics have portrayed the Eras Tour as showing Swift at the top of her game as a media-savvy, big-tent talent, a pop star with a knack for grand spectacle as well as the polished artistry of a classic songwriter.Shania Twain, the country-pop star whose career in some ways prefigured Swift’s, caught the Las Vegas stop of the Eras Tour, a 44-plus song production that goes as long as three and a half hours. She praised Swift’s “beautiful balance” of high-tech stagecraft and intimate performance segments. “I have to applaud her,” Twain said in a telephone interview. “As a performer, I know that work that goes into it.”The power of Swift’s fan army — and fear of crossing the star, or even appearing to — has kept nearly all of the press about the tour sunny. Though some fans (and parents) balked at the ticket prices and challenges of securing seats, most frustration was directed squarely at Ticketmaster, not Swift. After a few weeks of headlines romantically linking Swift with a frontman some fans considered to be problematic, reports spread in the celebrity pages that they had split. (Swift’s representatives declined to comment for this article.)For fans, the shows are a pilgrimage, and a rediscovery of the joys of mass gatherings. Flights are packed with Swifties, and travelers trade stories and compare outfits — drawn from looks associated with Swift “eras” — in stadium corridors and parking lots. In Kansas City, the comedian Nikki Glaser was attending her eighth show, a commitment that she estimated has cost her $25,000.“This year I decided not to freeze my eggs,” Glaser said. “I’m going to put that money toward the thing I love most in the world, which is Taylor Swift.”Swift’s fans buy tour merchandise outside the stadium before a show in New Jersey.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesBefore Eras, Swift hadn’t been on tour since 2018. And her catalog has grown by seven No. 1 albums since then, fueled in part by three rerecorded “Taylor’s Versions” of her first LPs — a project hailed by Swift’s fans as a crusade to regain control of her music, though it is also an act of revenge after the sale of Swift’s former record label, a move that, she said, “stripped me of my life’s work.”“Folklore” and “Evermore” expanded her palate into fantastical indie-folk and brought new collaborators into the fold: Aaron Dessner from the band the National and Justin Vernon, a.k.a. Bon Iver, rock-world figures who helped attract new listeners.The other major tour this year that is enticing fans to book transcontinental flights, and to show up costumed and in rapture, is also by a woman: Beyoncé, 41, whose Renaissance tour is a fantasia of disco and retrofuturism. Like Swift, she is also a trailblazing artist-entrepreneur, maintaining tight control over her career and fostering a rich connection with fans online. Together with Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a critique of the patriarchy told in hot pink, they are signs of powerful women ruling the discourse of pop culture.But in music, at least, the scale and success of Swift’s tour is without equal. Later this month, after completing 53 shows in the United States, she will kick off an international itinerary of at least 78 more before returning to North America next fall. Beyoncé’s full tour has 56 dates; Springsteen’s, 90. (Recently, Harry Styles wrapped a 173-date tour in arenas and stadiums, grossing about $590 million.)Outside Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, fans posed for selfies and shared their ticketing ordeals. Esmeralda Tinoco and Sami Cytron, 24-year-old former sorority sisters, said they had paid $645 for two seats. A stone’s throw away, Karlee Patrick and Emily DeGruson, both 18 and dressed as a pair in angel/devil costumes after a line in Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” sat “Taylorgating” at the edge of the parking lot; they said they had paid $100 for parking but couldn’t afford tickets.As Swift’s opening acts finished, the crowd rushed in. Glaser, the comedian, later said that of the eight shows she had been to, her favorites were the ones where she had brought her mother — and converted her to Swiftie fandom.“Everyone is in love with her,” Glaser said her mom told her after one show in Texas. “Now I get it.” More

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      Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour: Pop’s Maestro of Memory Returns to the Stage

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      The opening night of the star’s Eras Tour traversed her 10-album career, revisiting crossover hits, rowdier experiments and more restrained singer-songwriter material.GLENDALE, Ariz. — The most meaningful Taylor Swift recording of the past few years is almost certainly “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault),” as layered and provocative as its title is unwieldy. A revision and expansion of one of her most gutting songs — the original appears on her 2012 breakthrough pop album, “Red” — it dissects a problematic, lopsided and ultimately scarring relationship with forensic detail. It’s a scathing commentary on the ex who inspired the track, and it also has something to say about the version of Swift who first committed this story to song over a decade ago: Swift now understands things that Swift then couldn’t possibly have known.Around halfway through Swift’s three-hour performance at State Farm Stadium here on Friday — the opening night of the Eras Tour, her first roadshow in five years — she was at the center of the long runway stage, elevated on a platform, holding 70,000 people rapt with this tale of righteous fury and anguish. Plenty were singing along with her, but somehow, the accumulated voices sounded like one huge hush, students in awe of the master class.Swift opened the show with a run of songs from “Lover,” including “The Man,” performed in full office cosplay.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesThere were plenty of peaks during this concert drawn from the full arc of Swift’s career — the first of a sold-out 52-date national tour that made news for its disastrous rollout of ticket sales — but none quite like this. Throughout the night, she zigzagged between stretches of high-octane hits from older albums and mixed-bag selections from more recent ones — celebration with splashes of duty. What this ambitious and energetic if sometimes scattershot performance underscored, however, was just how many pivots Swift has undertaken in her career, and how the accompanying risks can have wildly different consequences.In modern pop parlance, album rollouts are often described as eras, but Swift’s career hasn’t always been that cleanly delineated. She’s made a few key turns over the years, though — on “Red,” when she divebombed into gleaming, centrist pop; on “Reputation,” when she made some of her sleekest and most au courant music; and on “Folklore” and “Evermore,” when she transformed into a woodland fairy.Songs from “Red,” one of Swift’s most acclaimed albums, arrived mid-show, and they were potent wallops — a jubilant and cheeky “22” followed by the indignant “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble.” And when Swift, in a one-legged bodysuit embroidered with a snake motif, performed selections from “Reputation,” she showed just how wrongly maligned that album was upon its release. “Don’t Blame Me” was husky and alluring, while “Look What You Made Me Do,” performed in front of dancers trapped in glass boxes dressed as old versions of Swift, brimmed with attitude.Swift was cheerily, proactively defensive about “Evermore” — “an album I absolutely love despite what some of you say on TikTok” — but that segment of the show was particularly limp, especially the gloomy and spare “Marjorie” and “’Tis the Damn Season.” And the jolt from the melancholia of that restrained singer-songwriter release to the brazen stomp of “Reputation” was awkward. Songs from “Folklore” fared slightly better, especially “Cardigan” and “Betty,” but this section teetered toward melodrama, as if compensating for the less assured production on those songs.The set list over-indexed on the four albums Swift released after her last major tour, supporting “Reputation” in 2018 — the chipper and jaunty “Lover,” the one-two bucolic swaddle of “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and “Midnights,” released last October. But the Eras conceit also meant that Swift wouldn’t have to exclusively lean on songs from these albums, which have in general been less popular, consistent and ambitious than her earlier ones.Sometimes, Swift joined her dozen-plus dancers in crisp choreography.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesShe opened the show with a run of songs from “Lover,” a hit-or-miss album that still yielded some excellent tracks. “The Man,” performed in full office cosplay, was biting and hilarious, and “Cruel Summer” had an almost ecstatic chill to it. From there, she jumped back to “Fearless,” her second album, and the first one made with an understanding that her relationship with country music might only be a dalliance. The earnest pleas in “You Belong With Me” and “Love Story” still had their old bite.Before “You Belong With Me,” she asked if the crowd was “ready to go back to high school with me,” both a dare and a legitimate question. Of late, Swift — obsessive about memory and even more obsessive about lore — has made revisiting her old work integral to her public presentation. Her ongoing rerecordings project layers a veneer of artistic liberation atop a business tug of war with the owners of her master recordings. And the very notion of the Eras Tour suggests a desire to thread Swift’s many selves into one, to find common cause between the 16-year-old who first shocked Nashville, the 33-year-old who has since become one of the defining pop stars of the 21st century and all the Swifts in between.If this show was an opportunity to perform songs from all of those phases, she did not always choose the tracks that are truly the most emblematic of those moments in time — sometimes specificity doesn’t age terribly well. (For what it’s worth, a song it would have been great to hear from each album, chronologically: “Picture to Burn,” “White Horse,” “Dear John,” “Stay Stay Stay,” “This Love,” “Dancing With Our Hands Tied,” “Paper Rings,” “Exile,” “No Body, No Crime,” “You’re on Your Own, Kid.”)Fans did not appear to be playing favorites — many of them were dressed as Swift from various eras, or as song titles or specific lyrics, or as Swiftie inside jokes. And Swift herself tackled each period of her career — the dynamic ones and the flaccid ones alike — with real gusto, in outfits covered in glitter, or fringe or glittery fringe. Her stage was set up for both big-tent power and maximum intimacy; it jutted out into the crowd for almost the entire length of the floor. Sometimes, she joined her dozen-plus dancers in crisp choreography, like on “ … Ready for It?” “Bad Blood” and, most vividly, “Vigilante ___,” for which she performed an enthusiastic chair routine.She concluded with a selection of songs from “Midnights,” a challenging album to wrap a show of this magnitude — it’s more an amalgam of old Swift ideas than a harbinger of a new direction. During “Anti-Hero,” the screen behind Swift showed a version of her as a kind of King Kong, bigger than everyone and unfairly besieged, and on “Lavender Haze,” she was surrounded by dancers hoisting huge cloudy puffs.Swift tackled each period of her career with real gusto, in outfits covered in glitter, or fringe or glittery fringe.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesThere was a distinct shimmer that ran through the night’s final three selections, the tinny “Bejeweled,” the spacey “Mastermind” and the needling “Karma.” All of those songs, which can be brittle from a lyrical perspective, benefited from the scale of the production here.But something far more meaningful had come just before that show-closing run. During an acoustic segment, she came out to the very farthest point of the stage, sat at a small piano and played her very first single, “Tim McGraw” (the only song she performed from her self-titled 2006 debut album).In addition to “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” it was the night’s other pillar performance. It’s a song about memory and the ways in which people fail each other, and she sang it heavy with regret and tinged with sweetness.But unlike “All Too Well,” which now benefits from the wisdom that time affords, “Tim McGraw” remained as raw as the day it was recorded. No real tweaks, no rejoinder from the new Swift to the old one — just a searing take on the sort of love that makes for a better song than relationship. There are some things Swift simply has understood all along. More

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      Taylor Swift Wins Album of the Year, Again

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Grammy AwardsGrammys: What HappenedWinners ListBest and Worst MomentsBeyoncé Breaks RecordRed CarpetAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBeyoncé Breaks Grammy Record; Top Prizes for Billie Eilish and Taylor SwiftTaylor Swift takes album of the year, becoming the first woman to win three times.March 14, 2021, 11:37 p.m. ETMarch 14, 2021, 11:37 p.m. ETTaylor Swift broke a record with her album of the year win for “Folklore.”Credit…Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressTaylor Swift’s “Folklore” won album of the year on Sunday, making the singer and songwriter the first woman to win the prize three times, following her victories for “Fearless” in 2010 and “1989” in 2016. Swift tied Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon as the only artists with three career best album trophies. (The mastering engineer Tom Coyne has won four, including one for “1989.”)“You guys met us in this imaginary world that we created,” Swift said during her acceptance speech, flanked by her collaborators Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, Laura Sisk and Jonathan Low. Dessner, who collaborated remotely with Swift on the pandemic album, called her “one the greatest living songwriters, who somehow put trust in me.”[embedded content]A surprise release in July, “Folklore” represented Swift’s foray into more acoustic sounds and indie-rock textures following years of pop bombast. She was nominated six times in all on Sunday, but lost in five other categories before taking home album of the year.“Evermore,” the “sister record” to “Folklore” and Swift’s second secret pandemic release, came out in December, meaning it could be nominated at next year’s Grammys and represents her fourth potential album win.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Taylor Swift Performs Songs From 'Folklore' and 'Evermore' at the Grammys

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Grammy AwardsGrammys: What HappenedWinners ListBest and Worst MomentsBeyoncé Breaks RecordRed CarpetAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBeyoncé Breaks Grammy Record; Top Prizes for Billie Eilish and Taylor SwiftTaylor Swift performs a medley from her pandemic albums.March 14, 2021, 9:34 p.m. ETMarch 14, 2021, 9:34 p.m. ETTaylor Swift performs atop a cottage set in a magical forest.Credit…TAS Rights Management, via Getty ImagesTaylor Swift, who was nominated for six Grammys at Sunday’s show, performed a three-song medley from her two pandemic albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore,” atop — and then within — a makeshift cottage set in a magical forest.Swift was joined for the understated renditions by her two chief songwriting and production collaborators on those albums, Aaron Dessner of the National and Jack Antonoff, moving through abbreviated versions of “Cardigan,” “August” and “Willow.”“Folklore,” released as a surprise in July, was responsible for five of Swift’s six nominations tonight — she was also up for a song she wrote for the film “Cats,” but lost to Billie Eilish in the preshow event — and would bring Swift her third career album of the year win, should she end up victorious. “Cardigan,” which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, is also nominated for song of the year.The song “Willow” came from Swift’s second surprise album of the pandemic, “Evermore,” which was released in December, well after the Grammys deadline on Aug. 31, and would be eligible at next year’s show.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Taylor Swift’s ‘Evermore’: Let’s Discuss

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyPopcastSubscribe:Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsTaylor Swift’s ‘Evermore’: Let’s DiscussA second album written and recorded during pandemic lockdown carries the singer and songwriter further from conventional pop.Hosted by Jon Caramanica. Produced by Pedro Rosado.More episodes ofPopcastDecember 15, 2020Taylor Swift’s ‘Evermore’: Let’s DiscussDecember 9, 2020The Best Albums of 2020? Let’s DiscussNovember 29, 2020Saweetie, City Girls and the Female Rapper RenaissanceNovember 18, 2020  •  More

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      Taylor Swift Announces Second Surprise Album of 2020, ‘Evermore’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTaylor Swift Announces Second Surprise Quarantine Album, ‘Evermore’The “sister record” to her Grammy-nominated “Folklore” again features Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff and Justin Vernon, along with new collaborators.Taylor Swift’s ninth album, “Evermore,” is a creative continuation of her blockbuster “Folklore.”Credit…Beth GarrabrantPublished More

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      Taylor Swift Illuminates ‘Folklore’ in a Stripped-Down Studio Concert

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      “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions” is straightforward and cozy. Taylor Swift and her two main collaborators and producers for her album “Folklore” — Aaron Dessner (from the National) and Jack Antonoff (a linchpin of Bleachers and fun., and a producer for Lorde, Lana Del Rey and others) — play through the album’s 17 songs at Dessner’s Long Pond Studio, a rural haven in Hudson, N.Y. Conversations between the collaborators introduce each song; birds and insects chirp.“Folklore” was released in July, and the documentary, out now on the Disney+ streaming service, was shot in September. Swift, Dessner and Antonoff perform as a trio on guitars, piano and a handful of other instruments, stripping away some of the fussy intricacies of the album’s studio versions in a way that heightens the songs’ sense of pristine contemplation. Often the music is just a rippling piano pattern and a modestly strummed guitar or two, each note precious. “The Long Pond Sessions” is a small-scale, casual-looking production; Swift is credited as the makeup artist. Mostly it’s just three musicians in a room, wearing everyday clothes and headphones, analyzing and performing songs they’re proud of.The big twist is that the September sessions were the first time that Swift, Antonoff and Dessner were together in the same place. During the pandemic, they had each recorded in their own studios, collaborating long-distance. In a nighttime conversation on a deck at the studio, Swift says that playing the songs in real time will “make me realize it’s a real album. Seems like a big mirage.” Musicians deeply miss performing live; with any other album, she would have gone to tour arenas.Swift got her start bringing teen-pop scenarios — breakups, crushes, insecurities — to country music. Then she moved decisively into the pop mainstream, trading banjo for synthesizers. “The Long Pond Studio Sessions” is not the first time she has made clear that she’s the songwriter and not just the singer. The deluxe edition of her 2014 blockbuster “1989,” which was made with the Swedish pop mastermind Max Martin, included her own demos of some songs, demonstrating her authorship. And last year, alongside her album “Lover,” she released an extensive archive of journal and diary entries, including song drafts.“Folklore” backs off slightly from the bold-outline, clear-cut arena-pop songwriting of albums like “1989” and “Red.” In quarantine, Swift chose a more introspective approach — but also, as she points out when talking about “Illicit Affairs,” a choice to be less autobiographical than her past songwriting. For many of the songs, Dessner — one of the main composers behind the National’s somber, reflective rock — sent instrumental tracks to Swift; then Swift came up with words and melodies. In the documentary, Swift says she was nervous about telling her label, “I know there’s not like a big single, and I’m not doing like a big pop thing.”But her songwriting remains self-conscious and meticulous. Swift and her collaborators detail the ways that songs on the album overlap with and echo one another; three of them — “Cardigan,” “August” and “Betty” — tell the same story from different characters’ perspectives. She explains “Mirrorball” to Antonoff as a cascade of interlocking images: “We have mirrorballs in the middle of a dance floor because they reflect light. They are broken a million times and that’s what makes them so shiny. We have people like that in society too — they hang there and every time they break, it entertains us. And when you shine a light on them, it’s this glittering fantastic thing.”Swift has written and sung — particularly on her 2017 album, “Reputation” — about the pressures of celebrity. On “Folklore,” she sings about them more subtly in “Mirrorball,” “Hoax” and “Peace,” coming to terms with her place in the information economy. But she also knows how to feed tabloids. A big reveal from “The Long Pond Studio Sessions” is that the pseudonymous, no-profile songwriting collaborator on two key songs, “Exile” and “Betty,” is her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn. She got her headlines.For “Exile” — a cathartic post-breakup ballad that’s a duet with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver — Vernon appears remotely, from his own recording setup in Wisconsin. His face is almost entirely concealed behind a bandanna and a baseball cap, but the emotion in his voice rises to meet hers as the song spills over in recriminations.While “The Long Pond Studio Sessions” is a positioning statement like her recent Netflix documentary, “Miss Americana” — which revealed her longtime struggle to declare herself as a left-leaning thinker amid the conservative assumptions of country music — it’s also, more important, a musical experience. Songwriting — mysterious, telegraphic, crafty and personal as well as potentially lucrative — is Taylor Swift’s mission. “Folklore,” made under singular circumstances and challenging old reflexes, is likely to be just one step in her trajectory. More