ZURICH, Switzerland - “Never meet your heroes,” the saying goes. While I can’t say that I met Taylor Swift, her Eras Tour performance made me and an audience of 30,000 feel like they had, and the meeting was enchanted.
The masses of fans packed into Stadion Letzigrund in Zurich on Tuesday afternoon under the beating summer sun, well ahead of the evening showtime. It was the first of Swift’s two shows in the Swiss city.
The Eras Tour is the first musical phenomenon Swift has embarked on since 2018 – before the pandemic. Since then, she released three new albums – as well as another one, The Tortured Poet’s Department (TTPD), during the tour in April.
In addition, she re-recorded four previously released albums.
The Eras Tour encompasses songs from all the albums, each separated and organized by “eras,” with the sounds, outfits, and general vibes of each one.
The vocals before the first song are enough to bring any fan to tears, but mine fell in earnest when Swift appeared onstage – the first time this lifelong fan has seen her in person – singing “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” clad in the marshmallow pink that marks Lover (2019).
The Fearless (2008; 2021) era came next. When the opening to “Love Story” kicked in, the girl next to me squealed, “This is my first Taylor song!”
“Mine too!” I replied, completely aghast and blown away that two girls, living in Malta and Jerusalem, respectively, could have such a similar formative experience.
We became fast friends on the concert floor, taking turns fanning each other against the sweltering heat and retrieving water. She had come with her sister, their fourth show on the European leg. She wore a shirt handmade with symbols and dates of all the albums; her sister was clad in a handmade dress, with different sewn sections hosting symbols and lyrics.
A formative experience
I WAS 11 years old when I first encountered Swift’s music. Nearing the end of a playdate with a friend, we went up to the attic, where her family computer sat. “You don’t know Taylor Swift? Come, I’ll show you,” she said. The year was 2009; the summer was hot, and the air in the attic was stuffy from the day’s heat.
I watched two music videos that day: “Love Story” and “Our Song.”
Within a few months, I was the proud owner of two CDs, Taylor Swift and Fearless, thanks to babysitting pocket money. They featured heavily on my Discman and accompanied me on every road trip and every walk. During one particularly long car ride, I was scolded for listening to her music, and the Fearless CD insert I was reading was torn from my hands and stuffed in the plastic bag that served as a trash can.
Hot, angry tears brimmed their way in, but I remained stoically silent. When the car ride ended, I quietly picked the insert out of the trash, cleaned it from the accumulated dirt, and tucked it in my pocket, viciously stubborn and wildly possessive over what I had discovered and refused to lose.
As a child, I couldn’t truly know what it was she was singing about; I wasn’t familiar with romantic love. And I knew I couldn’t understand it, but her music and lyrics made me hope for what I was absolutely sure I would one day feel: something that is beautiful and big and gentle. In “You Are In Love” (1989), she writes, “And you understand now why they lost their minds and fought the wars, and why I’ve spent my whole life trying to put it into words.”
So when the Fearless era of the show began, I sang along to “Love Story” with all of my being. But it was not only me there in the present day; that little girl was with me as well, along with every version of myself thereafter, singing and dancing.
Her third album, Speak Now (2010; 2023), has only one song on the tour, but for me, it was the first album I ever heard that held such a strong sense of cohesion, like chapters in a book, with the songs speaking to each other. When she sang the words “I was enchanted to meet you,” she pointed at the entirety of the stadium, left to right.
Not every song was like that. After all, there are only so many meaningful songs a child can retain. But the ones that weren’t meaningful to my memories in that way were pure, simple fun.
That was the other side of the magic of it all. I and the people around me – when we weren’t screaming lyrics at the exes in our heads or reliving old memories branded with music – were having the kind of childlike fun we struggle to catch as adults, like how the color of the seashore appears more blue to children and grays in our eyes with age.
We jumped and flailed our arms to “22,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “Blank Space,” and “Shake It Off.” The woodsy, witchy vibes of Folklore and Evermore laid an added aura of magic around the stadium as the sun set, providing some cooling relief.
Swift climbed out onto the Folklore cabin, a beamed structure built to look like a wooden cabin, complete with grass on top. She told the audience of her experience of distractions and disappearance during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was upended. This was the place she went to at that time, she said, to her imagination and her storytelling.
Past and present
Folklore stands out from the discography in that it has three tracks – “Cardigan,” “Betty,” and “August” – in which she is not the narrator of the song, she explained; this was a way for her to shift the perspective and explore storytelling from a different point of view. The story is one of a high school summer love triangle and explores the themes of adolescent love, cheating, ephemerality, and forgiveness.
“‘Betty’ is my song!” the teenager standing next to me told me excitedly as Swift began strumming the opening chords to Folklore’s 14th track. And in my mind, I heard the lyrics from “I Hate It Here (TTPD)”: “I hate it here, so I will go to secret gardens in my mind. People need a key to get to, the only one is mine. I read about it in a book when I was a precocious child.”
Everyone in the crowd wore their Sunday bests; glittery dresses with cowboy boots and hats, black shimmery bodysuits, and concert t-shirts. The one thing that everyone had in common was friendship bracelets, some made months in advance, to trade at the concerts. This tradition is a homage to the line, “Make the friendship bracelets,” from “You’re On Your Own, Kid” (Midnights, 2022). And so, we did.
I wonder if this is what people mean when they say that experiencing artists in their prime is categorically different than joining in afterward. I don’t much like the implications because they negate the very fundamental premise of art: longevity.
But I cannot deny what this was: a woman who has managed to raise and parent folks all over the world for 17 years. To see it all come together held both an element of completion and curiosity – a sense that the relationship with her poetic music is now cemented and unmovable.
What she has given us has granted girlhood its long-robbed permission for celebration, and now it can be experienced for years to come.