Taylor Swift’s record-breaking world tour, the Eras Tour, came to an end on December 8th, 2024. After 149 shows spread across 21 months, Swift took her final bow at BC Place Stadium in Vancouver, British Columbia, and I was fortunate enough to be among the more than 50,000 fans in attendance that night.
The concert itself, over three hours long, was truly spectacular, which isn’t a shock in the slightest, given how hard Swift and her crew worked to ensure this would be the case each and every single night of the tour. However, this being the final show of the final leg of the highest grossing tour in history also brought with it a slew of emotions that elevated the whole experience to an almost indescribable extent.
Before I continue, I should confess that this was actually my very first time seeing Swift in concert. In fact, it was my first time seeing any non-classical musician in concert since I’d gone with my sister and some friends to Justin Bieber’s debut tour 14 years prior.
This might seem incomprehensible to a lot of people, but it’s simply because I’m just not a huge music fan, per se – I rarely listen to the radio, I don’t have a favorite band or genre, I don’t have Spotify or any other streaming music service, and my own mother is more up-to-date on the music scene than I’ll ever hope to be. In fact, most of what you’ll find on my phone is just movie scores, some Broadway cast albums, the occasional pop song that I hear used in a TV show and end up loving… and Taylor Swift.
Contrary to my largely ambivalent attitude towards the music industry in general, Taylor Swift is my obvious exception. For the past decade, I’ve devoured her music, eagerly anticipating each new album release, dissecting her vast collection of intricate song lyrics, singing my heart out in a packed IMAX theatre for the Eras Tour concert film, and overall embracing life as a Swiftie. If there were ever an artist, then, whose concert I would consider hopping on a plane and spending hundreds of dollars to attend, it would be Swift.
That being said, when I watched the concert film in theatres back in October of 2023 (which showcased the original iteration of the tour, which ran from March 2023 to March 2024, before Swift revamped the show in May 2024 to include a set dedicated to her most recent studio album, The Tortured Poets Department), I didn’t know I would be attending the tour for real just over a year later. For all intents and purposes, that three-hour experience was the closest I ever thought I’d get to share in the joy of a Taylor Swift concert, and I made sure to cherish it.
As expected, the film brought me to tears on several occasions, but by far the most emotionally resonant moment of the entire night came during the set dedicated to Swift’s ninth studio album, evermore. Partway through the set, Swift takes a seat at a moss-covered piano and speaks to the crowd while playing the opening chords of her acclaimed song "Champagne Problems."
As Swift goes on to explain, evermore was the second album she crafted during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and "Champagne Problems" in particular was a song she felt would be really cathartic to sing live in a stadium. I cried during this speech, deeply moved by the full-circle nature of Swift not only getting to finally perform the song three years later, exactly as she hoped she one day might, but also doing it as part of the biggest tour of her career to date.
Fast-forward 14 months, then, and I found myself in BC Place in Vancouver, huddled alongside three friends (and tens of thousands of fellow fans) as Swift sat down at the moss-covered piano for the very last time. She expanded on her original sentiment, sharing with the crowd a bit more about her experience writing the piano ballad in the height of lockdown in 2020: “If you remember where we were, at that point, we didn’t know the future of concerts. We didn’t know if we were ever gonna get to do this again, where we’re all in the same room, gloriously singing the same words at the same time, and relating to each other and feeling like we’ve all been there before.”
With the Eras Tour having reached over 10 million people since Swift took her first bow in Glendale, Arizona in March of 2023, it’s easy to forget that, as Swift noted in her speech, back in 2020, there was truly no guarantee live music gatherings would ever be able to happen to this same extent again. This dearth of communal in-person experiences was something I certainly struggled with quite a bit myself during the pandemic, so to then wind up on the other side of that prolonged period of uncertainty and get to hear Swift, the biggest pop star in the world and the only musician I actually really care about, talk about just how badly her pandemic self hoped she’d get to be back here one day, made me even more of an emotional wreck during this speech than I was the first time I heard it.
Not only was I now actually in the aforementioned same room as Swift and all these other people singing her songs, but I was also acutely aware, as a deeply sentimental person, of the fact that it would never happen again. This precise moment, where Swift got to speak to the fears that so many artists and fans had shared four years earlier about the longstanding ramifications of the pandemic while standing in front of an Eras Tour crowd was living proof that not just her, but all of us, had made it through that collectively devastating period in our lives, was taking place for the very last time. Such an incredibly poignant moment would never happen again for me, for any other Swiftie, or for Swift herself.
This moment in the show was, therefore, exceptionally overwhelming in the best way possible, and it led to me crying throughout the entire three-minute performance of "Champagne Problems," a song I’d previously never really had much of a relationship with. While there are several tracks on Swift’s ninth album that I’m particularly partial to – namely, "Long Story Short", "Gold Rush", and ‘"Tis the Damn Season" – "Champagne Problems", admittedly, was never one of them.
That is, until now.
I say all of this because I think it perfectly captures exactly what Swift herself promised the crowd at the start of every show of the Eras Tour. Despite the associations we may have previously had with the music she’d be about to perform for us, Swift would declare that “after tonight, when you hear these songs, you’re gonna think about us, and the memories we made here tonight on the Eras Tour.” – and she’s absolutely right.
Ever since that cold December night in 2024, I’ll never listen to champagne problems the same way again. The same logic applies to other standout moments in the show for me, too, like Swift’s epic performance of "Don’t Blame Me", the dizzying nature of hearing "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart," a song written about the Eras Tour itself, live for simultaneously my first time and last time on said tour (chanting the lyric “As the crowd was chanting “More!” with a crowd of over 50,000 was particularly special), and the surprise song mega-mashup of "Long Live," "New Year’s Day," and "The Manuscript" on piano during the penultimate set of the entire tour.
I’m also fairly certain this whole experience ruined me for all concerts going forward – how can I possibly hope to top this, closing night of the Eras Tour? – but I also wouldn’t trade it for the world.
I may never be able to attend another concert again, but why would I need to?
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film is currently streaming on Disney+.