Travis Kelce makes a surprise appearance – his first! – as a backup dancer during Taylor Swift’s performance of I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.
Saying the crowd goes wild would be like observing that Miuccia Prada seems to have found reasonable success in a challenging sector. Fan screaming crosses a new decibel threshold. The woman one row in front of me who seems to be there alone stops singing along for the first time all night, because it’s too hard to sing when you’re sobbing.
As she has so many times tonight, Swift pauses to smile at the crowd. As if she hasn’t seen this about 1,000 times before. As if she’s taking it all in, and storing up the memory for later. My friend elbows me. ‘Can you even imagine what it’s like to be her right now?’
So surreal that it’s unimaginable. Like the expression of her wildest, most outrageous dreams, I’m sure. Since embarking on the Eras Tour in 2023, Swift’s life must have become a cocktail of experiences and emotions few people alive could understand. The adulation, the gruelling shows, the travel, the economic impact – all of it exhausting and energising, heady and bizarre.
By the time the tour wrapped in Vancouver in early December, Swift had performed to more than 10 million attendees and made more than $2 billion in ticket sales – more than twice as much as the second all-time highest-grossing tour. She played 149 shows in 21 countries and released a double album (The Tortured Poets Department) along the way. Her only peer at the tippy-top of the music industry is Beyoncé, and both Swift and Beyoncé reject comparison. Time Magazine may have named President-elect Donald Trump its person of the year, but the editors got it wrong. That title belongs to Taylor Swift.
Which raises the question: When you’re Taylor Swift and you’ve achieved so much, where can you go from here?
Extending and sustaining Eras Tour levels of activity and visibility for any longer simply wasn’t feasible. But Swift’s ambition, her prolific level of creative output and her prodigious work ethic suggest she isn’t likely to retire to a private island. Not for long, anyway.
miami gardens, florida october 18 editorial use only no use on covers of publications no book use taylor swift performs onstage during the eras tour at hard rock stadium on october 18, 2024 in miami gardens, florida photo by john shearertas24getty images for tas rights management
The Swiftie chatter is all speculative, of course, but the one thing most people expect, to the point that any announcement about it will be received as a confirmation rather than a revelation, is Reputation (Taylor’s Version). A re-recorded version of her sixth studio album with bonus tracks and extra content would put Swift one step closer to completing the re-records of the albums she made during her time with Big Machine, her first record label.
The next baby step is not a baby step. It would be committing to making a film.
That could prove just the thing to tide fans over until the other project everyone assumes Swift is on the cusp of announcing: an Eras Tour documentary. Film crews followed Swift through her shows, creating a trove of behind-the-scenes content that seems ripe for release as a film. The Eras Tour concert film is already three and a half hours long, so it would have to be a separate release.
Or she might take her filmmaking into a more narrative direction. In 2022 she sold a script to Searchlight Pictures, a film studio. She’s directed enough music videos (and a short film, for All Too Well) that she could feel ready for something bigger. At the Toronto Film Festival in 2022, she said she’s invested in telling ‘human stories about human emotion’ and, ‘I think that I’m at a place now where the next baby step is not a baby step. It would be committing to making a film.’
But what about the theatre? In May 2024, Swift trademarked the term, ‘Female Rage: The Musical’, which she first used to describe the Tortured Poets section of the Eras Tour setlist during her Paris shows. Somehow producing a stage show that could only ever play to one theatre’s worth of ticket holders at a time seems like one of the less plausible pathways ahead for Swift.
Then again, there’s always the quiet life. Some people say it’s possible that having conquered global culture so thoroughly, Swift will feel sufficiently at ease to back off and take a break. If they’re to have a future together, it might be nice for Kelce and Swift to experience a few months in the same country and/or city. She’s sung about how all her friends smell like weed or little babies ( in Florida) – if she’s going to take a few months off and pursue either of those… hobbies… now could be a good time.
Or not. I can’t imagine that someone with the motivation and determination to bring the Eras Tour to life and the stamina to sustain it across years and continents truly dreams about sitting on a front-porch swing, whether in Nashville or Kansas City.
No, I take comfort in imagining that even if Swift is enjoying a well-deserved holiday, she’s probably already working on something new – scrawling lyrics, picking chords, dreaming of her next era. In the new Eras Tour book, which she launched a publishing house to produce (because of course!), she wrote, ‘See you next era.’ I’m ready for it, whenever she is.
