Staff Writers Evelyn Shepphird and Alicia Khan interpret the mythology of Taylor Swift within the Eras Tour and explain her immense success through her narrative genius.
This article was first published in print on 16 September 2024.
Sixteen years after she played her first ever UK show at King’s College London’s student bar ‘Tutu’s,’ Taylor Swift invites Roar News’s Culture Editors Evelyn Shepphird and Alicia Khan to the London Eras Tour. These shows mark the final performances of Swift’s European leg of her Eras Tour and come immediately in the wake of the devastating cancellation of her shows in Vienna. It’s the second time she’s been to London on the tour after playing here earlier in June, and it comes sixteen years after Swift’s first ever UK performance, at the King’s College London student union.
The first five minutes of The Eras Tour are a perfect introductory amuse-bouche for the following three hours. The first image of gauzy, impossibly tall fans parading down an immensely long stage is sufficiently surreal. The backtrack rouses the crowd with a clever mashup of what amounts to one song per album, cut through with a beautiful violin piece and Taylor Swift’s inexorable and very apt “it’s been a long time coming” refrain.
The swaying fans and swell of music carry the audience into a dramatic, ethereal wave of emotion—disbelief and excitement, pure, unaltered joy—until the large purple fans burst open and Taylor Swift, glittering and gorgeous, begins the show with an energetic ‘Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince’. Here is the voice heard only through earbuds and car radios. These are lyrics that hundreds of thousands know at their very root. Taylor Swift sings, night after night, to hundreds of thousands of people. But to each audience member, it seems as though she sings only for them.
The impression is that of an extremely quick playback of childhood—a childhood that is at once perfectly individual and entirely collective, wherein Taylor Swift is the center. This is perhaps the heart of Swift’s success: her individual relationship with every audience member. Success in mass appeal and personal intimacy is a difficult dichotomy to strike, but Swift nails it. Taylor Swift, impossibly beautiful, is a woman the whole world has known since 2006. And she thanks the audience for “choosing to spend” their Friday night with her as if she isn’t the hottest ticket on the planet.
This is the genius of The Eras Tour. The show is uniquely Swift—a fortunate confluence of her mercurial aesthetics and brilliant re-recording project. While Swift’s re-recordings arose from much-publicised recording industry conflict wherein she lost out on the chance to purchase her early body of work when it was put up for sale, the project has been brilliant for the business of Taylor Swift.
With each re-recorded album, she reminds the world why she’s on top of it—because her laudable narrative ability and lyrical brilliance are evident in every single album. The tour itself is a “highlight reel” of Swift’s favourite moments from past tours and includes entirely new sets from Lover, folklore and evermore, Midnights, and the Tortured Poets Department. Impressively, even the newest album is received joyfully and known intimately by an adoring audience. Swift’s voice is iconic, but the Greek chorus of audience members singing along to the bridge of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” lends an overwhelming gravity to the concert.
There are moments on the tour that are already immortal, both for their recognizability and for the iconic status of the Eras Tour itself. In brilliant callbacks to past performances, Taylor Swift holds her hands over her head in the shape of a heart, something she’s done since she was fifteen. Later, spinning in a gauzy white gown during ‘august’ she is ethereal and already a ubiquitous image on phone backgrounds and article covers. Her clever employ of metaphor and symbolism catapult her into a state of mythology. There is an eternity to the ‘22’ hat, the ritual of giving it, each night, to some lucky child (16 August’s pick was a little boy to whom she mouthed “I love your shirt!”). Even her new symbols—the vintage, film-noir feel of her ‘TTPD’ album, the asylum imagery cut against a jazzy, old-Hollywood aesthetic are instantly iconic.
The show, half-literary, half-mythological, and more than significantly theatrical, enjoys a global impact that places it entirely in a league of its own. Technically, the show is as close to perfect as possible: Swift divides her time fairly among every corner of the stadium and the dancers, costumes, pyrotechnics, and sets are seamless. The show’s impact builds from exquisite attention to detail: during “All Too Well”, the lyric “Autumn leaves falling down / like pieces into place”, precipitates an eruption of leaf-shaped confetti over the floor seats. Later, during “I still remember / the first fall of snow / and how it glistened as it fell,” confetti descends again, this time as white snowflakes. Furthermore, the show is a physical feat: at the three-hour mark Swift dances and runs as enthusiastically as she did at the start.
The mythology of Taylor Swift is, by all accounts, intentional. The public performance of ‘Taylor Swift’ is the result of a careful narrative: the young girl writing songs in her bedroom becomes the bright young woman on the arm of Harry Styles, who then becomes the New York City socialite, and later the undeserved victim of Hollywood bullying. Witnessing the evolution of Taylor Swift in music is like watching Achilles fight the Trojan War; in both cases, narrative immortality awaits.
Taylor Swift’s invention of distinct aesthetics (and thereby, ‘eras’) for each new album is an easily comprehensible way of introducing symbolic elements to her narrative, and she continues to cleverly employ these symbols in a way that invites her fans to interpret and analyze her movements in a public sphere. The symbols function both as shorthand (a snake is an easy callback to Swift’s feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West) and as analytical material for Easter-egg hunting fans. On August 16th, after singing “He never thinks about me / except when I’m on TV,” Swift mimicked boyfriend Travis Kelce’s signature ‘archer’ pose, and Swifties immediately recognized Swift’s reference to the controversy earlier this year about Swift’s being featured too much on NFL broadcasts.
Her narrative genius was especially poignant during the ‘surprise song’ section of the show. Swift is as prolific as they come. As such, one of the most highly anticipated moments from each show is the acoustic section, in which she sings one song on piano and one on guitar, different at every show. The August 16 acoustic section started with ‘London Boy,’ a song about falling in love with a Londoner and ended it with a mashup of ‘Dear John’ and ‘Sad Beautiful Tragic’.
For an immensely popular song, it was noteworthy that Swift had gone over a year—the entire tour—without singing ‘London Boy’. Swifties guessed that this reticence was due to Swift’s highly publicized breakup with Londoner Joe Alwyn earlier this year would make love songs about him difficult to sing. The transition from ‘London Boy’ to the line from ‘Dear John’, “I’m shining like fireworks / over your sad, empty town,” is a harsh but accurate description of the London shows on the Eras Tour.
By putting those three songs together, Swift tells a narrative of an exciting new relationship poisoned slowly and tragically. Her admittance earlier in the show of writing ‘autobiographical’ songs serves as an invitation to her fans to analyze her public moves in the context of the greater narrative that Swift elegantly writes about herself. As such, the analytical efforts of these devoted fans drive the construction of a collective cultural mythology around the public figure of Taylor Swift.
As well as providing a brilliant show, Swift is an inarguable boon. Through massive donations to food banks in every city her tour stops, some argue that Swift has done more to combat food insecurity in England than the conservative government did in fourteen years. Economists argue that many American cities were saved from an economic crash by The Eras Tour. Universally, her staff lauds her generosity and kindness.
Nonetheless, unavoidable criticism about Swift ebbs and flows in a way Swift does not. Even at her most unpopular, her fans are immensely loyal. This is evidence both of Swift’s continually impressive skill and trustworthiness. Moments like the thundering, minutes-long applause after ‘champagne problems’, and Swift’s unwavering response, humble, grateful, and beaming at her full stadium, promising to “watch this moment back like a movie in my mind when I’m upset”, promise that she is as devoted to her fans as they are to her.
Amid a cultural zeitgeist reigned by pessimism, the impulse to throw as much love and optimism as possible at the feet of a woman who never acts too cool for it is as relatable as a Taylor Swift song. From her UK roots at King’s College London in 2008 to making history at Wembley Stadium in 2024, Swift’s rise to stratospheric heights is awe-inspiring. To the incredible musician, performer, storyteller, and poet who has provided an enduring, beloved soundtrack to the lives of many, we applaud your immense success.
Taylor Swift resumes ‘The Eras Tour’ on October 18th, in Miami, Florida. This second North American leg of the tour will be the final, with the show ending for good on December 8th in Vancouver, Canada.
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