The End of All My Endings
Dispatch From the Last Eras Tour Stop
In November 2023, my sisters, mom, and I found ourselves waiting with bated breath in a familiar place: a Ticketmaster queue - and not just any Ticketmaster queue: the waiting room for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour.
Tickets for this tour have been famously impossible to secure. When tickets first went on sale in November 2022, fans faced egregiously long wait times, high service fees, site crashes, and scalpers buying up large quantities and marking them up significantly on the resale market. Some tickets resold for $10,000. This horrific experience sparked the Department of Justice to open an antitrust investigation into Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company born after Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation, a concert promotion company, in 2010.
The Eras Tour has single-handedly shifted public expectations of ticket sales. In 2013, $350 could buy you a VIP ticket and photo with One Direction - today, that’ll get you a 100-level seat at an arena show and little else. My sisters and I had luckily swindled tickets to Swift’s Seattle tour stop in July 2023 by accessing resale tickets from a friend of a friend who was a Capitol One cardholder. Capitol One was the primary sponsor of The Eras Tour and cardholders got early access to tickets ahead of the general sale (I shudder to think at how many preteens fraudulently opened up accounts).
We signed up for the Vancouver presale kind of as a joke. The concert would be in December, around when my sisters and I would return home to Seattle for the holidays. Vancouver is only a three-hour drive from our childhood home - we could probably make the trip in one night, or stay a night in the city and make a weekend out of it. So the four of us applied for a presale code and, to our astonishment, received one. We were able to secure four tickets - at half the price of the Seattle ones, I might add. My sisters texted me screenshots of the purchase confirmation along with an “LMFAO.” Scoring these tickets, for a semi-reasonable price, was like capturing a unicorn.
“Great,” I told my family. “When should I fly in? I can book my ticket home.”
“Oh, that can probably wait. It’s still quite a ways out,” they told me.
What? I thought to myself, confused. I double-checked the date on the receipt and realized the show was in December 2024, not December 2023. The concert wasn’t a few weeks away - it was over a year away.
That moment put the scale of this tour into sharp perspective. Over 149 shows and twenty-one months, The Eras Tour has spanned five continents, garnered over ten million attendees, and grossed over $2 billion. It tipped Taylor Swift to billionaire status and acted as a physical manifestation of her fervent fanbase, which only expanded throughout the pandemic with acclaimed albums like folklore (2020) and evermore (2020) broadening her reach and reigniting admiration among past fans. In 2021, she began releasing re-recordings of her past albums as a means to gain control of her discography after the rights to her earliest works were sold under her nose. Her versions - Taylor’s Versions - have ignited a kind of public reckoning, forcing listeners to reflect on how Swift was slighted by past managers, lovers, and the listeners themselves. The re-recordings have also allowed her to smartly play into both nostalgia and novelty, as she publishes unreleased “Vault Tracks” alongside beloved classics like “You Belong With Me” and “Shake It Off.” As she and her fans are apt to remind us, she is indeed a “Mastermind.”
When Fearless was released in 2008, I became an instant Taylor Swift fan. The album reflected the feelings of unrequited love and heartbreak that I thought I was experiencing at age nine - it was like she was singing directly to me, an older sister telling me I’ve seen it all. When Speak Now came out a couple of years later, I remember driving to Target to buy the physical CD with my mom, which I uploaded onto my iPod. I remember placing the disk in my CD player and sitting cross-legged on the floor with the lyric booklet from the physical album. Swift’s songwriting struck me even then - I was an ardent reader then, but her words felt less distant than the fantasy and historical fiction on my shelves. From songs like “Mean” and “Enchanted,” I got the sense that she and I were walking parallel paths - that I would maybe one day experience the beautifully tragic love and heartbreak she sang so passionately about.
Many songs admittedly went over my fifth-grade head - specifically “Dear John,” “Innocent,” and later, “The Lucky One.” The kind of pain she conveyed in “All Too Well” is striking and richly illustrative - but it wasn’t something I could understand. These and other songs felt like sticking around the grown-up table for too long after dinner. I nodded my head like I understood, but I obviously didn’t. As Swift’s music began leaning more mature, I kept nodding and crying out the lyrics to “Dear John,” and wondering what on Earth happened to her.
Today, I do understand - and it’s heartbreaking. The Eras Tour works so well - Taylor Swift, the enterprise, works so well - because her body of work is a quite intricate life tapestry. If you listen to her albums to date in order of release, you’ll receive a tragically typical story of a girl becoming a woman - of starry eyes and blissful naivety turning to a weathered bleakness and sense of pragmatism.
Aside from her being a billionaire and a top CO2 emitter, I think Taylor Swift annoys many non-fans because her work is becoming increasingly self-referential - and frankly, self-indulgent. The tapestry now has many layers upon layers that are challenging to penetrate if you weren’t there at the beginning. Becoming a Taylor Swift fan after solely listening to Midnights (2022) or The Tortured Poets Department (2024) would be like becoming a fan of a TV show that you started during its seventh season. Particularly on TTPD (which contains many bright spots), her songwriting heavily nods to her specific, unrelatable experience of mammoth fame - making it challenging for fans and non-fans alike to connect.
I find Taylor Swift at her strongest when she’s able to capture the color of a very particular feeling and propagate it via her songwriting - which is why songs like “august” are in my personal Hall of Fame. But as someone who has been there since the beginning, who has examined and memorized the tapestry, being a fan of hers is an absolute joy - my most pleasurable of guilty pleasures.
After Thanksgiving, December 8 arrived in a hurry. I returned to San Francisco, unpacked my bags for four days, and then promptly repacked them. As the day approached, I learned that the show I was attending was the last Eras Tour show that Taylor Swift would ever perform - this colossal cultural spectacle would finally end that night, and I would get to be a part of it. I can’t believe I didn’t realize that sooner.
My sister, flying up from SoCal, was alarmed to find her flight filled with Swifties - all young girls and women and their mothers making their pilgrimage to Vancouver. On my flight from SFO, I was startled to see the same sight. The mother next to me checked into her Vancouver Airbnb as the plane taxied, her daughter - no older than seven or eight - colored beside her.
After arriving at Sea-Tac, my mom, sisters, and I piled into the car with our friendship bracelets, sequin skirts, and matching “I heart T.S.” shirts. I remembered the little girl on the plane and for some reason tried not to feel so pathetic. I turned twenty-four this year - I discovered Swift’s music about sixteen years ago. I’m past the age where she sings about being foolish and young - about “feeling twenty-two” or being “twenty-three inside a fantasy.” Each year, I feel happier and more sure of who I am. And each year, I feel as though I’m inching closer to the end of being an object of fascination and desire - the star of a story I admired growing up. I also feel as though I’m reaching the end of wanting to be that. As another year closes, it’s funny how those feelings all co-occur.
The city of Vancouver was lovely. I made my family and I dinner reservations at an Italian restaurant in the dreamy Gastown district, where we snapped a picture of the Gastown Steam Clock with the Vancouver Lookout in the background. We rented a small house in a suburb of East Vancouver and stayed up the night before the concert making friendship bracelets and drinking champagne.
The next morning involved a lot of thumb-twiddling. My mom and I took an early walk in the brisk air, marveling at the nearby mountains, and how better things seem in Canada, by way of being Canadian. We mulled around Yaletown, bought some Cadbury and Terry’s chocolate oranges. And then it was time to get ready.
I bought some white liquid liner and silver glitter at Ulta the day prior, and layered it on my lashline, flicking the liner outwards into a little wing. I used to apply black liquid liner every day before middle school - along with flat ironing my hair to a crisp - and I have the muscle memory down to this day. My sisters and I slid on our matching skirts and shirts. I paired mine with tights and slid on my cowboy boots and puffer jacket.
Downtown Vancouver was like a Taylor Swift shrine - another city highlighting its offerings to the goddess of pop. I caught wind of how far the attendees had traveled in line for food, the bathroom, and for merch - Detroit, Charleston, and Sydney, Australia were some of the furthest cities. My sisters and I snapped iPhone pictures in front of the Eras backdrop on stage, grinning like sorority girls in our coordinated outfits. I reviewed the photos as we sat in our seats, waiting for the concert to begin, duely noting how much older I looked than my little sisters, each of whom looked like high school- and college-aged variations of me. I wondered at what age we’ll begin to look the same again. I wondered if every other woman has felt this old at the green age of twenty-four.
When Swift finally popped out of the ground in her bedazzled bodysuit, she looked like a superhero about to take flight. I screamed the lyrics to “Cruel Summer” so loud I thought I might vomit. This concert is truly one of the most impressive feats of live performing to ever occur - over three hours of singing and dancing, with very minimal breaks in between songs and sixteen costume changes. Swift’s composure doesn’t falter for a second, nor does her beaming smile - every step, every breath, every flick of her microphone is meticulously choreographed. You can feel genuine joy emanating from her as 60,000 people scream - it’s miraculous, and psychotic.
I’m lucky enough (incredibly lucky, I can’t stress this enough) to have attended this tour twice, and thus, had two different experiences with it. At the Seattle concert last July, I sobbed throughout the entirety of the folklore set and tried to absorb the experience into my very being, fearful that I would somehow forget to encode it into my memory due to the sheer amount of emotion that overcame me. At the Vancouver show, I sipped a tequila soda and danced in my seat, focused on nothing more than having a good time.
“Hold onto the memories, they will hold on to you,” Swift sang during her acoustic set. The “surprise songs” of the final Eras Tour show included a fitting mash-up of “Long Live,” “New Year’s Day,” and “The Manuscript” - songs oriented around “endings” and never forgetting. Songs that also span a wide breadth of her catalog - songs for old and new followers alike.
As the surprise songs play, I glance around the stadium at all the people singing. I wonder what “endings” they’re thinking about as Swift sings. College graduations, elementary school graduations. The loss of a pet, the loss of a parent. Heartbreak, unrequited love. In 2024, Taylor Swift has become synonymous with Disneyland - she is the music industry, as they say. Which makes her a less-than-novel musician to fawn over.
Yet, so many manage to project their own experiences onto her - their hopes, their desires, their losses. Even those they may not understand. It’s rare and powerful and scary to have a unifier like that. To all be swaying and singing in a stadium like she’s some kind of deity. I guess that’s what we seek in art - and mainstream art, in particular - a hole in the tapestry, within which we can place ourselves and our experiences. A moment in which - cross-generationally - we feel unalone in our experiences. Like we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves.
At the end of the show, Swift hugged each of her dancers one by one, her face misty. We filed out of the stadium and reached our car within fifteen minutes of the concert ending. We rolled through the McDonald’s drive-thru, my middle sister ordered a Big Mac, thinking it was a single patty hamburger. We all laughed.
