“I want to thank every single one of you for being a part of the most thrilling chapter of my entire life to date,” Taylor Swift said last night in Vancouver. “My beloved Eras Tour.” Then she took her final bow and said goodnight — and meant it. Nobody really believed it was over until the house lights came on. (Is this the ending of all endings?) But she finished her historic Eras Tour with a bang, in front of 60,000 fans who’d traveled around the world to see the final show. It was an epic night, to crown an epic tour.
She didn’t pull any of the obvious final-show stunts — no special guests, no news announcements. But she saved her fireworks for the surprise-song slot, turning it into an emotional climax for the entire tour. “We’ve had so long to prepare for the end of this tour,” Taylor said, acoustic guitar in hand. “And so I was trying to think about what songs really encapsulate how I feel about tonight, so I decided to go back to the beginning.”
She began strumming “A Place in This World,” a teen confession, from the days when she just was an up-and-coming Nashville kid. Then she turned it into “New Romantics,” the fan-favorite bonus track from 1989. She sang the key line with 60,000 voices joining in — “Heartbreak is the national anthem / We sing it proudly.” She turned it into a cathartic manifesto for everything her Eras Tour has been about—as well as the tribal community that has gathered around this tour and followed it for two years.
She moved to the piano for a medley of “Long Live,” “New Years Day,” and “The Manuscript.” You could hear gasps in the room when she hit that line, substituting the word “era” for “decade.” With “The Manuscript,” from her April blockbuster The Tortured Poets Department, she brought the whole epic journey of her music full circle. Just a girl, looking for a place in this world, finding a community of kindred spirits with heartbreak as their national anthem.
It was an intense acoustic five-song segment that Taylor turned into a musical autobiography, bringing all her most passionate stories together. What a moment to witness — and the entire final night lived up to that level.
Ever since Taylor announced this summer that the Eras Tour would end in December, there’s been constant speculation about the final night. People around the world have been dying to see how this one ends. There’s never been anything like the Eras Tour before, the most ambitious and popular and phenomenal of music tours has ended, so the idea of it ending is a shock in itself.
But there was an overall sense of finality. It was emotional all around. Opening act Gracie Abrams asked the crowd, “Have all of you been crying all day like me?”
She didn’t do any gimmicks at the end. She didn’t even drop any Taylor’s Version news — not her debut, not Reputation, not the long-anticipated Debutation. (Although as she’s done all fall, she did a surprise song from the debut and another from Rep, because this artist likes to dangle nice things in front of our faces and then whisk them away. Paint us a blue sky, then go back and turn it to rain, etc. Why are we ever surprised?)
But the whole night full of tiny goodbyes. When she does “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” her back-up dancer Kameron Saunders takes the microphone to deliver the punch line, “Like, ever!” But tonight he yelled, “For the last time, no!”
As Taylor said, the communal fan experience around the Eras Tour has had a life of its own. “You guys have made this into something completely unrecognizable from anything I’ve ever done in my life,” Swift told the crowd. “With your traditions, with your passion, with the way you care about this tour — it’s unparalleled. I’ve never experienced anything like it.”
As she said, the fan rituals go way beyond anything she could have imagined. “I never thought that writing one line about friendship bracelets would have you guys all making friendship bracelets, making friends and bringing joy to each other. That is the lasting legacy of this tour, that you have created such a space of joy and togetherness and love, and I couldn’t be more proud of you, honestly. That is all you.”
That excitement was electric, all through the stadium. Fans buzzed with bags of friendship bracelets — I got a “123 Let’s Go Bitch” in the bathroom line, then traded a “Shimmering Beautiful” for a “One Night or a Wife.” The crowd was dressed for revenge, from the zombie bride wearing a “Fucked in the Head” sash to the “Tis the Damn Season” Christmas Tree. Thousands of fans paid $16 for “no stage view seats” — the steal of the century — just to listen and sing and be in the room.
“We have toured the entire world with this tour,” Swift declared. “We have had so many adventures. It has been the most exciting, powerful, electrifying, intense, most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my entire life,” she said. But after performing for ten million people in fifty different cities on five continents, it was over. “Tonight, we get to play one last show for you here tonight in beautiful Vancouver,” she said. “We are about to go on one last grand adventure together.”
Everybody knew this was the last time Taylor would begin “You Belong With Me” by asking the crowd, “Will you go back to high school with me?” — a question she’s been asking onstage for twice as long (two years) as she actually spent in high school (one year). It was the last night she’d sit at her piano, facing an audience she’d just tormented with “Champagne Problems,” and gave them a minute or three to make noise.
The entire night was full of those one-more-time moments. The last time she gives her “22” fedora to a girl in the crowd (wearing a “This is Not Taylor’s Version” shirt). The last time the dancers ride around on their glowing “Blank Space” bikes. The last time the umbrellas come out for “Midnight Rain.” The last time the Swiftie dads do a double take at Paul Sidoti’s Eddie Van Halen guitar during the Reputation interlude. Even before the show began, the “American Woman” guitar made fans realize this was the last time hearing the final countdown pre-show mix—the last “In Ha Mood,” the last “Applause,” the final minute of Lesley Gore singing “You Don’t Own Me” while the clock ticks down the seconds.
“It’s crazy I’m about to sing the last song I’ll ever sing in the ‘Folklore’ cabin,” Swift said, as she began “Betty.” She explained that when she began writing Folklore, the cabin was “a pretend escape place in my mind.” She spent those Folkmore songs trying to get out of herself. “I tend to be main-character-y in my songs — I don’t know if you’ve noticed?” But these songs gave her some distance to say, “I’m just a narrator. I just work here.”
People have been chasing this tour since the beginning — not just the phenomenal popularity, or the incredible demand. (not only was it the highest grossing tour of 2023, it topped the next two highest-grossing tours combined (Bruce Springsteen and Beyoncé). The people actually attending the show are a tiny fraction of the audience, with fans watching the grainy live streams night after night at Surprise Song O’Clock to catch what havoc she’s doing to the songbook tonight. Her devastating mashups which add whole new layers of emotional complexity to songs you thought you already knew, whether it’s “This Is Me Trying/Daylight” or “The Prophecy/This Love.”
But so much changed during the Eras Tour, as Taylor Swift’s music kept warping and evolving. The surprise album The Tortured Poets Department dropped in April, a 31-part song cycle she made during the tour, clearly in response to the tour. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” with its “lights camera, bitch smile!” refrain, is the song of a super-trooper performer who hears the crowd yell “1,2,3, let’s go bitch!” every night. Swift added the new songs to the set as Female Rage: The Musical, with the alien spaceship dropping “Down Bad” on an unsuspecting Earth. Over the night, the domestic Lover house crashes and burns, then turns the rustic solitary Folklore/Evermore cabin, which turns into the interplanetary mothership of Tortured Poets.
To make room, she combined the “sister albums” Folklore and Evermore are now combined into one era, which fans have unsurprisingly strong feelings about. Poor Evermore, the Meg March of the Swift discography, politely making way for her more attention-needy siblings—yet any animosity an Evermore freak might feel is totally wiped away by the fact that “Marjorie” makes the cut, the most Evermore of Evermore songs. There’s no emotional peak in the whole show like the goth seance of the “My Tears Ricochet”/“Marjorie”/“Willow” trilogy.
Rumors flew that there would be extra songs stretched on to the ending, but the show ended as usual with the Midnights blowout and “Karma.” Taylor also yelled one last “Karma is the guy on the Chiefs coming straight home to me.” (The Kansas City Chiefs won during the show, beating the L.A. Chargers 19-17, so call it Tayvoodoo, or call it what you want.)
The key line in her surprise-song version of “The Manuscript” came when she sang, “Now and then I reread the manuscript, but the story isn’t mine anymore.” What she meant is, the story was ours—it was one she turned back over to the audience, to take it and continue it on their own. It was a moment that seemed to sum up everything the Eras Tour has been about. It was her version of Prospero breaking his wand at the end of The Tempest.
There were so many moments tonight that seemed to sum up the entire adventure Swift has taken the audience on for the past two years. One came early one in the show, during “The Man.” There was a little kid a couple of rows ahead of me, maybe three or four, wearing cat ears, hoisted on her mom’s sequined back. A kid who’ll never grow up in a world where it’s unthinkable for a woman to take center stage to ask “when everyone believes you, what’s that like?,” which was the world her mother grew up in, as did we all. (The kid liked “The Man” but she was a lot more into “Lover.” She’s no fool.) That kid is going to learn the word patriarchy from “fuck the patriarchy.” You couldn’t ask for a better encapsulation of what the Eras Tour was all about.
There’s no going back to the world before the Eras Tour. An epic two-year adventure in dreaming up impossible things, then making them happen, until they start to seem almost inevitable. (Of course friendship bracelets! Of course surprise song mash-ups! Of course texting your friends at 3 am to ask “What on earth did she just do to us with “This love changed the prophecy?”) The whole night was a tribute to the Eras Tour and everyone who took part in it, whether they made it to an actual show or not. This two-year mission was a foolhardy act of imagination that has utterly changed the music world, one that only Taylor Swift could have envisioned. And one that only her audience could have made real. Long live.
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