Midnights (Album)

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    Taylor Swift Sells a Rainbow of Vinyl Albums. Fans Keep Buying Them.

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    Artists across pop genres are finding success with colored vinyl and different variants of their releases. For Swifties, the urge to collect them all is strong.When Taylor Swift released nine vinyl editions of her album “Folklore” in 2020, Tylor Hammers, a fan in Florida, took notice. But it wasn’t until “Midnights” two years later that he became a true collector, scouring the internet and retail shops for every variation of her albums he could find — spending about $1,000 in the process — and cataloging the technicolor expanse of Swift’s LP output in an online discography.“I get enjoyment out of being a completionist,” Hammers, 24, said in a recent interview.He’s not the only one.Although streaming remains the dominant music format, physical media has been a growing niche where the industry can cater to so-called superfans, who express their dedication to artists by shelling out big bucks for collectible versions of new releases, sometimes in multiple quantities. K-pop acts like BTS pioneered this strategy by putting out an array of elaborate CD packages, often featuring goodies like postcards and photo booklets, which helped the boy band repeatedly go to No. 1.But nobody does it quite like Swift, or at least at the same scale. Last year she sold 3.5 million LPs in the United States, thanks in part to five pastel-hued variants of “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her 2014 album, and the popularity of Swift’s entire catalog during her record-breaking Eras Tour.When Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” comes out on Friday, it will be available in a portfolio of different versions — on vinyl, CD and even cassette — with bonus tracks and, on certain “deluxe” editions sold through Swift’s website, trinkets like magnets, photo cards and engraved bookmarks. Some items, like a standard CD, go for as little as $13. But last weekend, Swift’s site offered a limited run of autographed LPs for $50, which, according to fans on social media, vanished in 20 minutes.“The Tortured Poets Department” comes out on Friday in a number of different versions and formats including CD, left, and cassette. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Grammys 2024: How to Watch, Time and Streaming

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      A guide to everything you need to know for the 66th annual awards on Sunday night.The 66th annual Grammy Awards, taking place on Sunday at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, is poised to be a big night for young women.SZA is the top nominee, with nine nods for her album “SOS,” which topped the Billboard 200 for 10 straight weeks. Taylor Swift, who rocked the entertainment world with her record-breaking Eras Tour, and Olivia Rodrigo, the 20-year-old singer-songwriter with a proclivity for rock, are both competing with SZA for the three major all-genre categories: best album, record and song. Joining them are a host of other female artists, including boygenius, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish and Victoria Monét. The sole male performer contending for the top three competitions? Jon Batiste.But the biggest winner of the night could be the musicians behind “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s meditation on what it means to be a woman today. The film’s soundtrack garnered 11 nominations across seven categories, with a mix of artists that includes Eilish, Dua Lipa, Nicki Minaj and Sam Smith.This emphasis on female representation is notable because the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammys, has been criticized in the past for failing to adequately recognize women. In recent years, the Grammys have worked to bring in a younger, more diverse membership, with the goal of making the voting process more transparent and fair.The awards show on Sunday will honor recordings released from Oct. 1, 2022 through Sept. 15, 2023. Here’s how to watch and what to expect.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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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 Halts Morgan Wallen’s Run at No. 1

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      After 12 straight weeks at the top, the country star’s “One Thing at a Time” yields to Swift’s “Midnights,” which was reissued in expanded editions.For 12 weeks, nothing could stop Morgan Wallen’s domination of the Billboard chart with his latest album, “One Thing at a Time.” Not Metallica. Not Ed Sheeran. Not the Jonas Brothers or solo projects from two members of BTS.Then came deluxe reissues of “Midnights,” Taylor Swift’s seven-month-old LP.With two expanded editions featuring bonus tracks, “Midnights” returns to No. 1, notching its sixth time at the top. One of the new versions, called “The Late Night Edition,” was primarily sold as a CD at Swift’s current stadium tour, though for 24 hours it was also available as a download from the singer’s website. Counting all variations, “Midnights” logged the equivalent of 282,000 sales in the United States last week, including 196,000 copies sold as complete packages and 108 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate.“Midnights” has been a steady hit since it came out last October. In its 32 weeks on the chart, it has never left the Top 10, and in all but three of those weeks it was in the Top 5. In the United States, “Midnights” has had the equivalent of nearly five million sales and been streamed 3.2 billion times.Lately, as Swift’s Eras Tour has become a cultural juggernaut, her wider catalog has also dotted the upper ranks of the album chart. Last week, Swift had nine titles in the Top 40. (“Lover,” from 2019, is No. 6 this week.) Swift also announced recently that a rerecorded version of her 2010 album “Speak Now” — featuring the hits “Mine,” “Back to December” and “Mean” — will come out in July.The return of “Midnights” bumps Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” to No. 2. Its 12-week consecutive run at the top was historic, falling just one week short of tying a record set by Stevie Wonder in 1977 among albums that open at No. 1 and hold there. Wallen’s last release, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” is No. 5 this week, its 122nd appearance in the Top 10.Also this week, “Almost Healed,” the new album by the Chicago rapper Lil Durk — featuring guest appearances by Alicia Keys, 21 Savage and Wallen — starts at No. 3 with the equivalent of 125,000 sales, including 168 million streams and 2,000 copies sold as a complete package. SZA’s “SOS” is No. 4. More

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      Connecting Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ With 13 Songs From Her Past

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      Tracing the pop superstar’s evolution by connecting 13 of her newest songs to 13 from her past.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesDear listeners,This past weekend, along with more than 200,000 people in the New York metropolitan area, I attended Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. I saw sights I will never forget: more than one person, in late May, dressed head to toe as a Christmas tree (an inside joke about Swift growing up on a Christmas tree farm … I think?); a father proudly wearing a handmade shirt that read “Real Men Listen to Taylor Swift”; enough sequins per square inch that, when the sun hit it right, MetLife Stadium could probably be seen from space.But, of course, I also saw a generation-defining pop superstar performing at the top of her game, throughout a sprawling, near-three-and-a-half-hour set that highlighted her stylistic versatility, physical stamina and ongoing evolution as a songwriter.Though Swift has long had a flair for both spectacle and intimacy in a live setting, what I couldn’t shake (shake, shake) during this marathon 45-song set was how completely she’s come into her power as a performer. She knows how and when to ham it up — like the frequently memed moment when she gives her flexed biceps a kiss before donning a sparkly blazer for the synth-pop statement “The Man” — but she also knows when to scale back, as she does during the beloved segment of the show when she accompanies herself on guitar and piano and plays two “surprise songs.” (Not to brag, but I got to see “Holy Ground” and “False God.”)In his review of the Eras Tour’s opening night, my colleague Jon Caramanica called Swift, rightly, “pop’s maestro of memory.” The “eras” conceit of the tour allows Swift to reflect on and momentarily embody her past selves; “Are you ready to go back to high school with me?” she asked playfully before her 2008 hit “You Belong With Me.” But she does something similar on “Midnights,” her latest album and the one that feels most directly in conversation with her own vast back catalog (which I noted in an essay shortly after the LP was released).That brings me to today’s playlist. It is, essentially, my own expanded version of “Midnights,” placing each of its 13 tracks as a response to an earlier Swift song.(Listen along on Spotify as you read, and find YouTube links below.)Making your way through its 26 songs, you will hear how Swift’s songwriting, perspective on love, vocal stylings and aesthetic preferences have all evolved over time. The G-rated romantic of “Love Story” becomes the fed-up 30-something bristling at “the 1950s [expletive] they want from me” on the “Midnights” opener “Lavender Haze.” Swift’s adopted home of New York City goes from an idealized abstraction to the locale of a more specific heartbreak in the progression from “Welcome to New York” to “Maroon.” The pining narrator of “Teardrops on My Guitar” feels miles away from the wizened woman singing “Midnight Rain,” who has realized that love and marriage won’t solve all her problems. In the long arc of Swift’s chronology, “Enchanted” gradually becomes, well, disenchanted.Evolutions in instrumentation and production choices emerge, too: not just how banjos and guitars morph into drum machines and synthesizers, but how much darker most of “Midnights” sounds even in comparison to her first “official” pop album, “1989.” Jack Antonoff produced both the bouncy “How You Get the Girl” and the later “Question …?”, which feels like a hazier and more melancholy variation on a similar theme.In losing her illusions, though, Swift gains strength, perspective and resilience — not a bad trade-off. In “Nothing New,” a song she wrote when she was 22 and rerecorded with Phoebe Bridgers in 2021 for the rerelease of her 2012 album “Red” — she worries about the future; a decade later, on the incisive “You’re on Your Own Kid,” she tells her younger self, with earned wisdom, “You can face this.”In the spirit of the Eras Tour, I hope this playlist stands as a testament to the depth and emotional acuity of Swift’s catalog. The specific connections between these songs will be a little easier to clock if you’re already a card-carrying Swiftie, but if you’re only familiar with one side of Swift, this playlist can also serve as a crash course in her many transformations.Feel free to make your own expanded version of “Midnights” — I found it a fun exercise! — but I’m a mastermind, and this one’s mine.You’re on your own, kid,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Midnights (Lindsay’s Version)” track listTrack 1: “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)”Track 2: “Lavender Haze”Track 3: “Welcome to New York”Track 4: “Maroon”Track 5: “You Belong With Me (Taylor’s Version)”Track 6: “Anti-Hero”Track 7: “Enchanted”Track 8: “Snow on the Beach” (featuring Lana Del Rey)Track 9: “Nothing New (Taylor’s Version)” featuring Phoebe BridgersTrack 10: “You’re on Your Own, Kid”Track 11: “Teardrops on My Guitar”Track 12: “Midnight Rain”Track 13: “How You Get the Girl”Track 14: “Question …?”Track 15: “Bad Blood”Track 16: “Vigilante ___”Track 17: “Tolerate It”Track 18: “Bejeweled”Track 19: “Treacherous (Taylor’s Version)”Track 20: “Labyrinth”Track 21: “Mean”Track 22: “Karma”Track 23: “Peace”Track 24: “Sweet Nothing”Track 25: “Blank Space”Track 26: “Mastermind”Bonus tracksAs I mentioned, Swift played some top-notch surprise songs at the show I attended. If you don’t believe me, crank them up: from “Red,” the ecstatic, guitar-driven fan-favorite “Holy Ground,” and from “Lover” (anywhere from my second to my fourth favorite Swift album, depending on the day you ask me) the slick, slinky “False God.” Darling, it was good. More

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      Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Touches Down in New Jersey

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      The pop megastar’s first of three shows at MetLife Stadium featured an appearance from the rising rapper Ice Spice, a fan-favorite song and loads of sequins.On Friday afternoon, a seemingly endless parade of Taylor Swift fans wearing flowery dresses, sparkly cowboy boots, sequined T-shirts and handmade friendship bracelets made their way to East Rutherford, N.J., turning the vast asphalt parking lot at MetLife Stadium into a pop-up performance space, a fashion runway and a meeting ground for friends, old and new.Two months and 25 shows after the pop megastar’s career-spanning Eras Tour began, the show arrived in the New York area for three weekend dates — her first concerts near (but not quite in) her adopted hometown in five years.“I really, really missed you!” Swift told the sold-out crowd of more than 72,000 people.And they had missed her.Fans in the parking lot of the stadium came with balloons.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesFans dressed up as Swift in different eras, wearing colorful and sparkly outfits.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesMelanie Murrat, an enterprising Swift devotee, entertained those gathered in the parking lot.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOne young woman announced that she was crying tears of joy as she strode down a tunnel leading to the parking lot. Two fans with tickets to Saturday’s concert who had traveled from Costa Rica came hoping to see Swift on Friday as well. A woman in an “I ❤️ T.S.” shirt refused an interview request, admitting that she teaches at a public school and was not supposed to be at the stadium on a Friday afternoon.Even getting into the parking lot required dedication — and a potentially pricey ticket.Six months after ‌a Ticketmaster presale filled with snags, a single seat at the show on Friday was available on the secondary market for no less than $1,000. The astronomical costs led Swift’s loyal fans, known as Swifties, to band together to help each other find tickets at fair prices.Charlie Tokieda, 39, of Brooklyn, got face-value tickets to Friday’s show by waiting online during the presale, and he bought another pair of tickets on the secondary market to a show in Denver to celebrate his birthday in July.“We did get a great deal, and that great deal could have bought a pretty nice used car,” he said.On Friday afternoon, security guards in orange shirts stood near the gates that formed a perimeter around the parking lot and demanded to see proof of admission before stepping aside. It was part of an effort to crack down on “Taylor-gating,” — hanging out in the lot and listening to the concert without a ticket — which MetLife Stadium said would not be allowed.While the mood outside the stadium was celebratory, a host of ticketless fans camped out, hoping for a chance to see the show.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesMaria Naeem, 32, who arrived via Uber around 9:30 a.m. and slipped into the parking lot unnoticed, was among the smattering of fans and chaperones who remained outside as Swift was preparing to go onstage. Naeem, a doctor, had asked two colleagues to cover her shift and driven from Virginia in hopes of buying a ticket at will call.“They’re not selling, and everything online is very expensive,” she said, disappointed.Many of Swift’s most dedicated followers dressed in D.I.Y. costumes, resembling the singer during different moments of her career. One fan draped herself in a pink-and-white “Taylor Swift 2024” flag. Others sported skirts that featured snakes, a reference to Swift’s 2017 album, “Reputation.”Robert Pszybylski, 19, of Long Island, wore a flowery shirt inspired by Swift’s 2021 Grammys dress, more or less custom-made for the concert.Though Swift didn’t take the stage until close to 8 p.m., the scene in the parking lot was bustling most of the afternoon.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesFans made and traded friendship bracelets.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesSwifties admired their newly procured merchandise.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times“I kept Googling ‘3-D embroidered floral fabric,’” he said. “I ordered off Etsy from China. It took a month to get here.”Even those who were not fortunate enough get tickets found other ways to take part in Taylor Mania.For months, fans with and without tickets have been obsessed with procuring concert merchandise, sometimes camping out overnight to get first dibs on the most coveted items. Perhaps in anticipation of a mad rush to vendors, MetLife Stadium’s flagship store began dispensing merch a full day early.But those efforts did little to shorten the lines on Friday, when, in addition to a prized blue crew neck sweatshirt, fans were hoping to take home a new special edition “Midnights” CD (yes, a CD!) that included a remix of the ‌song “Karma,” featuring the up-and-coming Bronx rapper Ice Spice.Fans in the parking lot enthusiastically sang along as though they were inside the show.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesNear the end of the show, Swift premiered the remix’s video starring Ice Spice, announcing that while in the studio, she “not only fell in love with her, but just decided she’s the entire future.” The rapper later joined Swift onstage to debut the remix and close the show. Cue a fresh round of frenzied screaming.Though she has played about 40 of the same tracks during each three-hour-plus set, Swift has also unveiled a handful of “surprise songs” to keep delighted fans on their toes.On Friday, she invited her frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff to perform “Getaway Car,” a fan favorite from “Reputation,” then took a seat at a piano for “Maroon” from “Midnights,” the most recent of the four albums she has released since her last tour.The LP, she said, was about “nights throughout my life,” “things that kept me up” and “memories you keep going back to.”“Maroon,” she said, was about a memory from — you guessed it:And I lost youThe one I was dancin’ withIn New York, no shoesLooked up at the sky and it was maroonFans who had spent the show in the parking lot at the end of a long night.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times 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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      SZA’s ‘SOS’ Holds Off Taylor Swift for a Fourth Week at No. 1

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      Both artists introduced new digital versions of their albums, bringing a tight race to a typically sleepy week on the Billboard charts.The R&B singer and songwriter SZA has edged out Taylor Swift to hold at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart for a fourth time, attaining a notable victory during what is usually the post-holiday sales doldrums.“SOS,” the long-awaited second LP by SZA, who was born Solána Rowe in St. Louis and raised in suburban New Jersey, had the equivalent of 125,000 sales in the United States last week. That total included 162 million streams and about 3,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.It is the first time an album by a woman has held at No. 1 four consecutive times since Adele’s “30,” which reigned for six weeks at the end of 2021, Billboard reported. (Swift’s “Midnights” notched five No. 1’s over a six-week stretch last fall.) “SOS” is also the first R&B title by a woman to rack up four weeks at the top since Alicia Keys’s “As I Am” (2007).“SOS,” a steady streaming hit that features guest spots by Travis Scott, Phoebe Bridgers and other artists, faced stiff competition last week from “Midnights.” Both SZA and Swift released special digital versions of their albums to lure fans. SZA sold two versions, containing extra tracks, while Swift’s website sold four editions, featuring variant artwork and bonus commentary cuts, for one day only.Swift’s promotion helped “Midnights” move the equivalent of 117,000 sales, up 10 percent from the week before, including 58,000 copies sold as a complete package. “Midnights” holds at No. 2 for a fifth week in a row.Also this week, a number of recent hits crawl back up the chart as holiday albums disappear like so many Christmas trees hauled to the curb. “Heroes & Villains” by the rap producer Metro Boomin rises one spot to No. 3, Drake and 21 Savage’s “Her Loss” is No. 4 and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is in fifth place.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which dipped below the Top 10 for two weeks at the end of the year, jumps back five spots to No. 6. Since its release two years ago, “Dangerous” has notched a total of 101 weeks in the Top 10, dropping out only three times during the holiday-albums crushes in 2021 and 2022. More

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      The Best Albums of 2022? Let’s Discuss.

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicWas the past year defined by Beyoncé’s “Renaissance,” a nostalgia-minded tour of club music from the recent past as well as the not-so-recent past? Or was it shaped by Rosalía’s “Motomami,” an album of restless futurism and post-genre exuberance?Those two albums are the only releases that appeared on the year-end lists of all three New York Times pop music critics. Outside of those, they included pop and un-pop country music, New York drill rap, British post-punk, San Jose hardcore, nepo baby pop-punk and much more.On this week’s Popcast, The New York Times’s pop music critics discuss these albums (and also the absence of Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” from their lists).Guests:Jon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticLindsay Zoladz, a pop music critic for The New York TimesConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More