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Singer Taylor Swift has delivered a master class in her latest Eras tour.
What Swift could put into words Friday night as she kicked off the Eras tour — her first road show since 2018, since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, since the release of four separate studio albums was how this whole thing would go.
She offered yearning acoustic ballads like ‘Lover’ and ‘Enchanted’, her voice high and winsome; she sneered through sarcastic electro-pop tracks like ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, ‘You Need to Calm Down’ and ‘The Man’, the last a sly commentary on restrictive gender roles that played out on a set designed to look like an office.
Read more: Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour first concert: Here’s the full Setlist
Accompanied by a band that included four backing vocalists, she burrowed into the intricate bedroom-folk sounds of her twin pandemic LPs, ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’, singing ‘Invisible String’ from atop a mock-up of a mossy woodland cabin.
Flanked by dancers, she went big and shiny for the one-two punch of ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’ into ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’, then went even bigger and shinier for the section of the show devoted to ‘1989’, her most exuberant release.
‘Midnights’, which broke a number of sales and streaming records when it came out in October, got one of the night’s longest sequences as Swift strung together seven of its bleary R&B-adjacent cuts, including ‘Lavender Haze’, ‘Midnight Rain’ and the Hot 100-topping ‘Anti-Hero’; in each she smeared the edges of her voice, using it for texture as much as for narrative.
