It’s a little before 6 p.m., and I’m on the floor at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, watching as the bowl begins to fill. I’m here with my daughter for the final night of the U.S. leg of Taylor Swift’s the Eras Tour. My daughter is an unabashed Swiftie; this is the third show she’s seen since the tour kicked off in March in Arizona, and she is in full regalia, wearing a red dress and floral headdress in honor of Swift’s 2012 album, Red. That record was inspired, in part, by the musician’s breakup with Jake Gyllenhaal; it features two of her best-known songs, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “All Too Well.” I am in regalia also: a friendship bracelet my daughter made for me (“Swiftie Dad,” it reads) and a “Cancel Jake Gyllenhaal” T-shirt with a red X across a photo of the actor’s face. This, too, was a gift from my daughter, part of what you might call our collective ensemble, and as we move through the concession lines and take selfies at the foot of the stage, other concertgoers approach to voice their approval or to ask to take a photograph.
“You’re going to be on a lot of Instagrams,” my daughter says, laughing.
It was my daughter’s idea for us to come to SoFi; she’s nearly 25, which makes this an Eras Tour for us as well. Tonight is the fourth Swift concert she and I have attended; the first was in 2010, when she was not quite 12. There aren’t a lot of artists—the Grateful Dead are an exception—whom I’ve seen more, but I’m delighted to be along for the ride. It’s not just all the parents with their kids, most of them younger than we are, respectively. It’s also the sense that this is a kind of heritage, a set of shared experiences: a tradition, as my daughter likes to say.
I was always the concertgoing parent, the one who went to all the shows. When my daughter was a young teen, I took her to the Jonas Brothers and Demi Lovato; we listened to them in the car as I drove her to school. Even then, Swift was operating on a different level: Her songcraft was more nuanced, more ambitious than that of her peers. She never stayed within the lines. As an example of what I mean, let’s return to those tracks about Gyllenhaal, who’s served as a pretty good anti-muse to Swift. On the one hand, there’s the cheekily ironic in-your-faceness of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” “I’m really gonna miss you picking fights,” Swift sings. “And me falling for it, screaming that I’m right / And you would hide away and find your peace of mind / With some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.” On the other, there’s the slow build and introspection (“And maybe we got lost in translation / Maybe I asked for too much”) of “All Too Well.”
For my daughter, like a lot of Swift fans, such lyrics offered a model of empowerment, the articulation of a worldview. In these songs, Swift is self-aware, unwilling to take shit from anybody. And she lived what she wrote: In November 2020, she began to rerecord her own back catalog so that she and not her former record label would control the masters. Talk about winning a breakup.
Is it any wonder that my daughter holds her in such regard?
Tonight’s show begins with a short set by the Nashville-based singer Gayle, followed by the Los Angeles band Haim. (Later, the Haim sisters will join Swift onstage to perform the song “No Body, No Crime.”) After the openers finish, my daughter and I gear up for the main event. We’ve been listening to Swift all afternoon; she was the soundtrack to our drive. We’re sitting about 10 rows back from the lip of the catwalk, and I can feel the excitement rise throughout the arena as we draw close to 8 p.m. Then, a giant clock appears on the vast video screen that backs the stage, and Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” begins to pump out of the PA.
“She was 17 when she recorded this,” I tell my daughter.
“I know,” she responds. Perhaps she rolls her eyes.
My daughter is in the moment, or in the moment that’s about to happen. I, as ever, find myself toggling between parallel dimensions, the outer world and the one within my head. In the latter, I’m tracing a line, six decades long, from Gore’s 1963 recording to this show. “You don’t own me,” Gore insists. “Don’t try to change me in any way.” Could there be a more appropriate walk-on song? Soon, the clock ticks down and Swift is onstage, performing “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” a 2019 number that could be a through-the-looking-glass response to Gore’s lament. “Boys will be boys,” Swift sings, “then where are the wise men?” It’s a dramatic start to a career-spanning concert that seeks to weave its more than 40 songs into the fabric of a narrative.
That’s important, because narrative is what Swift is after: her own, yes, but also one that speaks to, or for, her fans. I’ve thought about it each time we’ve seen her: the pacing, the costume changes, the between-song banter, the moments of connection. Sometimes, these can feel contrived or even cringy, as with the extended standing ovation (a feature every night, my daughter informs me) that stops the show for several minutes early on. More often, I have the sense of her performance, the arc of it, as if not spontaneous then still authentic, a collective rite in which we all participate.
That feeling is heightened in the shadow of the pandemic, which kept Swift off the road and many of us in our homes. Watching her, you can see how difficult being offstage must have been; she is a performer who needs the fans as much as they need her. Indeed, as the evening progresses, I begin to think of the stage as an extension of her imagination, another set of parallel dimensions. That becomes most pronounced in the set of songs from Folklore, released in July 2020, after she canceled the tour for her album Lover in the depths of COVID. Swift introduces “Betty,” written from the point of view of a 17-year-old boy, by saying she wanted to write through a different set of eyes. During the Folklore songs, the stage set is anchored by a moss-covered dream house, which stands there like an idea in three dimensions, a reverie brought to life.
The notion of narrative is deepened by the fact that the Eras Tour is celebratory, a retrospective. Swift is performing not just a concert but a show. This kind of staging is more common now than when I was regularly seeing live music, and it’s a big part of the draw for fans. Yes, this is on track to be the highest-grossing tour of all time; the six shows at SoFi alone have purportedly added $320 million to Los Angeles’s economy. Those facts aside, there’s also something inchoate and personal at stake. For all its span and scope, in other words, the Eras Tour is not nostalgic. It’s not a greatest hits revue. Rather, it’s about reconnection and recognition, from both sides of the stage.
The Eras Tour is about finding one another again.
For me, that has everything to do with my daughter, whom I can still see at 11—“I Am Taylor’s No. 1 fan!” she inscribed on the handmade sign she brought to that first concert. Now, my daughter is an adult, living and working on the other coast, and I am grateful to Swift for bringing her back to me.
Upon entry, each audience member is given an LED wristband; in the deep well of the stadium, I watch these lights flicker and change color like a swarm of stars. Next to me, my daughter belts out every lyric, screams and waves her arms. Her pleasure is so unmitigated, so unselfconscious, I feel a knot grow in my throat. Although I like the music, it would be a stretch to say I am a Swiftie. I am a casual fan at best. But here, in this moment, I feel a continuity, a return.
The difference, of course, is that the shows were once a good deal smaller; Staples Center, where we saw her the first three times, has a capacity of 20,000. In comparison with the more than 70,000 people at SoFi, I joke, that feels like having seen her in a club. From my seat, I have trouble calibrating the giant video screens with the actual performance. My eye naturally goes to the outsize image, rendering the real Swift simultaneously smaller and larger than life. It’s got to be strange, to be this intimate at such a distance. It’s got to be strange to see tens of thousands of fans dressed up to look as you do, to stand on a stage and listen as tens of thousands of voices sing your own words, your own life, back at you.
Late in the show, Swift addresses the issue directly; when she hears the audience, she confides, “I don’t feel alone anymore.” It’s a vivid expression of the power of a mass event, of live music specifically, to transform us, even though it never fully can. Every show, every era, comes to an end, and what we are left with are the bits and pieces, the feelings and the memories. And yet, there’s something else, a sense of having been a part of something, of participating in a community, of seeing and being seen.
I don’t want to make too much of this; there’s a lot of commerce blatantly intertwined with the art here. But it’s also necessary for us to be reminded of the community that culture can create, especially after the enforced isolation through which we’ve all just lived. (Need another example? Look no further than the fans traveling the globe for Beyoncé’s Renaissance or dressing in pink to see Barbie.) Three years ago, I couldn’t visit with my daughter except behind a mask and at a distance. During one stretch, I wasn’t able to hug her for more than six months. I say that not as complaint, merely as observation. We did what had to be done. Now, however, as I inch my way back into the world, I find myself eager for the pleasures of assembly. This, Swift has acknowledged, was the impetus for the Eras Tour, and as my daughter and I leave the stadium together at nearly midnight, more than six hours after our arrival, I appreciate her choice.
“It’s like I got this music in my mind,” Swift sings in “Shake It Off,” which she performs toward the end of the evening, “saying it’s gonna be alright.”
For this one night, at least, she isn’t wrong.•
