Experiencing Eras, Worldbuilding, and the Prismatic Liveness of Taylor Swift and The Eras Tour

“You look like Taylor Swift / in this light, we’re loving it” sings Swift on the track “Clara Bow” off her The Tortured Poets Department album (2024). When I first heard this line of lyrics, the various star personas—or should I say “eras”—of Taylor Swift flashed through my head. So too did the countless iterations of The Eras Tour. Even though I may never attend The Eras Tour in person, I have attended countless versions of The Eras Tour by other means. I’ve watched and listened through the smartphone cameras of fans who document and share their unofficial fan recordings online and I’ve watched the three official versions of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film from my seat in the theater, faculty office, and couch at home. As Christa Anne Bentley, Paula Clare Harper, and I argue in Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans, Swift is a prismatic figure for the musical world of the twenty-first century. “Hold Swift up to the light,” we write, “and it becomes possible to pick out an array of discrete topics for inquiry and investigation.”1 The Eras Tour is similarly prismatic, offering participants a variety of entry points to express and understand Swift’s star personas, songwriting, performances, media presence, and fan community. While the cultural, economic, and even seismic impact of The Eras Tour is well documented,2 what draws me to The Eras Tour is its multimediality and the intimacy it generates between spectator and star persona, both of which features combine with the tour’s intricate worldbuilding, as it weaves together the distinctive identities of each era. As a mediated live-music phenomenon, The Eras Tour is a fascinating example of the digital liveness of contemporary music eventscapes, or the event-environment nexus.3 In the review essay that follows, I trace a few of the invisible strings that Swift, her production team, and fans weave through the rich tapestry that is The Eras Tour: tour versioning, mediated and social liveness, and worldbuilding.The Eras Tour is Swift’s sixth concert tour, which launched on March 17, 2023 in Glendale, Arizona, spans five continents, and—at the time of writing—is scheduled to conclude on December 8, 2024 in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada). At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Swift’s much-anticipated Lover concert tour was canceled as Swift, her fans, and the world entered lockdown. During that time, Swift found a creative outlet in her music, writing and recording the albums folklore (2020) and evermore (2020)—each with their own surprise release—and filming folklore: the long pond studio sessions (2020) with her collaborators Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff at Dessner’s Long Pond Studio in the Hudson Valley in New York State. Swift later released the Midnights album (2022), just prior to the announcement of The Eras Tour. Up until this point in her career, Swift named her tours after her most recent album release, which the tour would support, but this time Swift acknowledged she had to take a different approach to album promotion and setlist curation. She settled on a modular approach that segmented the evening into sets representing each of her “eras” (which coincide with albums) performed in nonchronological order across the performance event.The Eras Tour setlist and concert experience is a marathon of song, dance, elaborate set and costume changes, fan-artist interactions, and mediated spectacle. The Eras Tour is notably an expression of Swift’s dedication to her fans, as it is designed in part to repay them for their years of committed fandom and their continued support.4 Audiences who regularly attended her concerts, including The Eras Tour, watched Swift grow up and enter adulthood on stage, just as many of her fans had gotten older over years of watching her shows and listening to her albums at home.5 The version of The Eras Tour captured for the Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version) concert film begins with Swift’s “Lover” era, followed by the Fearless, evermore, reputation, Speak Now, Red, folklore, and 1989 eras. She follows 1989 with her now iconic acoustic mini-set before rejoining her band and dancers for the final era (at the time of filming at SoFi Stadium), Midnights.Swift uses the term eras to refer to the atmosphere and aesthetic of each album. For example, Swift thematized the color red and its many permutations on the album Red, infusing it into the costumes and set design for her music videos and live appearances that promoted the album and its singles. Curating her eras became a way for Swift and her team to artistically articulate and manage her gradual shifts and frequent reinventions as an artist. Fans have made the term eras their own, taking it up to self-identify their mood or state of being, saying, “I’m in my Lover era,” or “I’m feeling rebellious, so maybe I’m entering my reputation era,” or asking followers on TikTok, “what era are you in?” Swift, of course, didn’t invent the term era. It is a common expression used to refer to an album cycle and is used by artists and others to categorize a defined stage with a distinctive aesthetic within an artist’s career (e.g., David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era). The term is usually applied by outside observers to historicize an artist. What makes Swift’s use of eras stand out is the extent to which she has integrated the concept into her stylistic curation and worldbuilding, even returning to her past to retroactively build out the eras of past albums. It is also significant that she applied the term era to her own career.At the time of writing, The Eras Tour is ongoing; Swift wrapped up her European leg and is taking a moment of pause before the next (maybe the final?) North American leg is launched. Each release of the concert film, of which there have been multiple, has included more concert content than the one before; releases include the official theatrical release, the Video on Demand (VOD) rental, and the Disney+ streaming version that Swift subtitled “(Taylor’s Version),” an extended cut that encompasses the full setlist plus extra surprise songs from other acoustic sets that were staged during a multi-show film shoot. Online video-sharing platforms like YouTube and TikTok afford musicians and their fans a digital space to create new content, collaborate, and—in the case of The Eras Tour—share and archive their concert experiences. Mediated by the screens of their camera phones, fans—including members of the Swift fan community, who call themselves Swifties—perform fandom and document their experience of The Eras Tour, taking us from their bedrooms into the stadium. We bear witness to their concert preparations and rituals with their friends at home leading up to the concert. They handmake friendship bracelets to wear and trade at the concerts and design intricately planned outfits that draw references from Swift’s music videos, eras, and previous stage costumes. We observe expressions of their fandom at the event itself as they participate in parking-lot concerts in line while waiting for the venue doors to open and dance and sing along with Swift and other fans. Using their phones, fans produce vernacular concert footage that documents performances of both Swift herself and Swiftie fandom. One last context where we engage with different versions of The Eras Tour is the music-video treatment for Swift’s “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” off The Tortured Poets Department. The song’s music video incorporates a narrative format that alternates between footage of Swift rehearsing staging and choreography for The Eras Tour, Swift using stagecraft tricks behind the scenes during the tour to get into position, Swift performing songs on stage from different eras, and fans singing along to “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” in the stadium.To document the spectacle that is The Eras Tour for the movie-theater screen and the screens of those watching at home required forty camera operators and an extensive team of camera and sound technicians.6 Like the many excerpts of The Eras Tour I’ve watched online, The Eras Tour concert film uses footage from multiple shows. The fact that this cinematic remediation compiles, curates, and edits audiovisual footage recorded over three nights at SoFi Stadium into a single imagined representation of a night of the tour is a notable feature of the concert film and its translation of a “live” experience. Moreover, fans who attended the SoFi shows went online to share their experience as fans (or “extras”) during the filming, observing the professional production team’s technique of placing microphones in the lower bowl section of the stadium to record the fan soundscape. Fans also closely documented the strategic camerawork that translated both the monumental spectacle and intimate moments of liveness to viewers. They observed the camera crew on stage with Swift during the first night, when the crew zoomed in on Swift and recorded close-up action shots. On night two, the cameras were positioned at different locations on the edge of the stage to film Swift from multiple points of view, capturing moments such as when she drops to her knees at the edge of the stage during her performance of “my tears ricochet” and reaches out to the audience and the camera. Finally, on night three, fans noticed camera drones high above their heads that filmed aerial shots capturing the scope and scale of the concert spectacle and other visual markers of liveness. A live musical experience, even a recorded one, as Paul Sanden explains, “was usually––and for many, still is––considered better, more authentic, more human than a recorded or broadcast experience. To perceive a musical experience as live, then, is to perceive its distinction from something (more highly) mediated. Liveness cannot exist, and has never existed, without also implicating its mediated Other.”7 Fans took to social media and online fan forums to unpack the camerawork and recording setup for each night of filming, deconstructing the film second by second—noting, for example, that in some shots Swift’s nail polish was chipped and in others it was not. When I watch the concert film’s edited sequence of Swift performing “my tears ricochet,” my audiovisual perspective shifts from intimately close, next to her microphone, to distanced, with a shot that zooms out to full-body choreography. I’m listening back and forth across all three performances, which have been stitched together in postproduction into one cinematic “live” event.Throughout the concert film, the camera cuts to the audience. Shots depict fans recording and listening through their camera phones, intergenerational fandoms that include older siblings and parents who attend with their younger siblings and children, groups of fans who carefully craft their eras-themed outfits, and fans dancing, singing, laughing, crying, and screaming out in community for Swift and each other. Close-up shots of fans emotionally overwhelmed by their experience transfer that affect to concert-film viewers who relate to or come to understand the intense fandom felt and expressed by the Swiftie community. The concert film is not only about Swift’s performance: it also documents performances of Swiftie fandom. Mediated live performance has the capacity to reflect fandom back on the audiences that enact and feel fandom. The Eras Tour is not an isolated instance of such mediated fandom. It was also reflected in the camerawork during The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, broadcast by CBS in 1964.8 Extended pauses choreographed into Swift’s performance, which allow her to listen to the crowd scream and to speak directly to it (and catch her breath), communicate visceral performances of live fandom to concert-film viewers, many of whom also sang and screamed along from their seats in the movie theater. Reports from actual live shows speak to the loudness of the crowd and sometimes the inability to hear Swift over the screaming and singing fans. The haptic resonance of fandom is just as important as the music when characterizing the atmosphere and experience of The Eras Tour. Again, this soundscape of fandom is reminiscent of accounts of The Beatles’ first performances in North America, when reviews reported on the liveness of the audience and the performances of fandom rather than what the Beatles sounded like or the songs they performed in their setlists. When my mum describes the night she saw The Beatles at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto in 1964, she—like local music reviewers in the day—emphasizes the sound of the crowd reacting to the tiny band on stage from the nosebleed seats of the hockey arena in a time before large-screen displays.The Eras Tour offers illustrations of what Philip Auslander refers to as social liveness. These are moments when there is a sense of copresence or connection with others involved in the event, whether those people are performers or members of the audience, either in situ or constructed by the mediated feedback between technology and user (e.g., the use of the zoom function on a camera to the stage or Swift directly into the camera to with the fans the concert film in the notable of social liveness as expressed through fan-artist intimacy take on the monumental Eras Tour Swift’s with fans, and the acoustic section of The Eras Tour to the era offers an for fan for one fan from the audience, when an that is to the one Swift in the music video for her song, on stage and becomes a of fan-artist At the of as performed in the concert film, Swift to the of the stage where the fan is to the and them the she is that fans refer to as an important instance of fan-artist intimacy that the camera zooms in on during the The camera Swift at the edge of the stage and into the audience to the on the head. is an expression of fan-artist and and the of is felt by the fan and those who Even when an concert experience, Swift not the of fan-artist interactions, as she moments of social and musical intimacy with the her in Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans, Christa Anne a variety of Swift’s acoustic performances from her at before she a recording to her performance at a performance aesthetic to Swift’s Each night on The Eras Tour, Swift her fans and her that she is first and a by an acoustic The of songs in the on and one on as a surprise to the fans in they in Eras concert. approach to the setlist an of and for fans in and to the liveness and of each on the While fans may have the setlist in for their Eras experience, they never which songs that night in an acoustic until Swift the first few or acoustic set follows the spectacle of music from 1989 in the concert-film setlist with the Swift her acoustic and out to her acoustic set from the of the as to her fans as It is a moment on The Eras Tour stage, just Swift and her fans. 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