By: Rebecca Lothson
It was six, seven o’clock on a late spring evening in East Rutherford, New Jersey in 2023. I was sitting in the hard plastic seats of MetLife stadium taking in the anticipation brewing within myself and the people around me. We all understood that we were not just here to see a concert, we were here to see history. We were here for the Eras Tour.
Up until this point I had been to my fair share of concerts, but nothing of this scale. Nothing nearly as large as a sold out football stadium. For most artists I would be largely disinterested in hiking down to New Jersey to see a small, indistinguishable dot of a person singing on stage, but Taylor Swift was different. Taylor Swift interested me, rather enthralled me, and dragged me into her world. Swift had been a force to be reckoned with in the music industry for years, but in 2023 she was in her prime. She was getting her flowers, putting out new music as well as re-recording and expanding the albums she had already released. She was doing something that had never been done before. She seemed unconvinced that the music industry couldn’t change, that it would always be unfair to its artists and undermine them, and she was passing this skepticism on to her fans. Taylor Swift has always been known to put her heart and soul into her songs, reliving deeply personal experiences and weaving complicated lyrical webs. In 2023 she was taking back her words, her songs, her eras. This power was why I set aside my doubts about a stadium concert to witness the Eras Tour, and it surpassed my every expectation, something Taylor had suggested to me before in her lyrics.
What if I told you none of it was accidental?
And the first night that you saw me
Nothing was gonna stop me
I laid the groundwork, and then
Just like clockwork
The dominoes cascaded in a line
What if I told you I'm a mastermind?
On this night in May, me and 82,000 other fans were gathered together in complete synergy waiting for Taylor Swift to take the stage and change our lives. In a crowd full of strangers, there was no one who didn’t belong. We were in harmony, setting aside the cruel reality of the outside world and our lives for just one night of pure bliss. In this space, nothing was too much. The lights weren’t too bright, the stage wasn’t too big, the crowd wasn’t too loud, and no outfit was too extravagant. Even I felt underdressed in my long white flowing skirt and flower crown. In my section alone there was a girl with a handmade replica of Taylor’s bedazzled Lover bodysuit. There were ten friends in the row in front of me, each dressed as a different album. There were painted jeans, jackets, faces, hands, all paying homage to Taylor’s songs and career in some way. There were clear bags and water bottles, mediocre stadium food and fresh, newly purchased merchandise. There was everything and everybody necessary to experience the Eras Tour except one thing, Taylor Swift herself. Then suddenly at 8 o’clock sharp, her voice rang out through the packed stadium.
It’s been a long time coming
It had been a long time coming. Five years exactly. Five years since her last tour. Taylor arrived by triumphantly rising from beneath the stage. She had on a bejeweled bodysuit and knee high boots. She held onto a rhinestone microphone and she commanded out attention. Her stage presence told us that she had overcome all the adversity thrown her way and the hardships of the past couple of years and that we could too. The best part of Taylor’s arrival was this: everyone acknowledged it. The crowd went wild, their screams filling the air. Even though I was wearing earplugs, I could hear all 82,000 of us clearly. I had to use the bathroom, and yet I was frozen in place. I couldn’t move, no one could. We were suspended in time for almost four hours, held there by Taylor. There was a sense that no one was going to leave this stadium, ever. That even after the concert was over we would be stuck at this one moment in 2023, trying to reach the same high we felt when Taylor sang to us, when just for a moment the world was simple.*
Taylor Swift during the Fearless section of The Eras Tour
* I adapted Joan Didion’s style of new journalist writing in The White Album in this blog post. I specifically drew inspiration from her section about The Doors to discuss Taylor Swift and The Eras Tour. I wrote in the same structure that she used, often drawing direct quotes from her work and reframing them to fit into my scenario. I tried to emulate Didion’s precise description of the people and spaces she was in and the way she brings the reader into a specific time and event that they might not have experienced.
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