VANCOUVER — To get a sense of how long Taylor Swift’s Eras tour lasted, consider that both a big-budget concert film and a hardcover photo book documenting the road show came out while the show was still on the road. Consider that one of the superstar’s former opening acts, Sabrina Carpenter, has become a superstar herself. Or consider that Swift’s latest LP contains a song she wrote about her experience on the Eras tour — a song she went on to add to the very production that inspired it.
And now, believe it or not, it’s a wrap.
After 149 dates spanning five continents over nearly two years, the Eras tour — the highest-grossing concert tour in history, with estimated ticket sales in the neighborhood of $2 billion — came to an end at last Sunday evening with the third of three sold-out concerts at BC Place.
It was the series finale of a cultural phenomenon that reshaped fan culture, that launched countless memes, that grew so popular that people started buying so-called no-view seats to hang out behind the stage and sing along with the tens of thousands who could hear and see the show. Swifties of all ages turned up Sunday dressed to mark the occasion: in snake-related garb à la “Reputation,” in cotton-candy pinks and blues nodding to “Lover,” in rust-colored fisherman’s caps like the one Swift wears on the cover of “Red (Taylor’s Version).” Anticipation regarding what might happen on closing night rippled through the stadium before the singer appeared onstage, not least because of the numerous cameras peppered around the floor and rigged on wires overhead.
Swift, who’ll turn 35 on Friday, acknowledged the special circumstances early in the three-and-a-half-hour show: “Pretty cool night to be in Vancouver, huh?” she said after ripping through her song “Cruel Summer.” Later, after “Champagne Problems,” she absorbed a thundering ovation from the crowd that lasted a full three minutes. “This tour has been the adventure of a lifetime, and I speak on behalf of my band, my crew, my fellow performers, who all love their families and have spent time away from everything that they know and love and have performed when they were sick, when anything was going on in their lives,” she said. “I just wanted to say that on behalf of all of us, I will never forget you giving us that moment.”
Yet for the most part Sunday’s performance was the Eras show as Swift has done it night after night since May, when she slightly revamped the production she launched in March 2023 to incorporate material from this year’s “The Tortured Poets Department” album (including “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” about the gigs she played game-facedly last year while amid a breakup with the English actor Joe Alwyn).
Taylor Swift performs at Vancouver’s BC Place on Sunday.
(TAS Rights Management)
Indeed, the slick professionalism of the concert raised an intriguing paradox for anyone who walked into BC Place wondering whether the tour’s conclusion might finally be the thing to crack Swift’s determination: A once-in-a-generation songwriter capable of extreme feats of vulnerability in her music, Swift understands that the performance of vulnerability requires real strength. Also: to expect her to have broken down in tears or some such is to assume she hasn’t been relishing the idea of a vacation.
The conceit of the Eras show is — well, was — simple: a survey of Swift’s career, taken album by album, stretching back to her self-titled debut from 2006. But because of the breadth of her catalog, the presentation here could still astound you. She played strummy pop-country songs (“Fearless”), throbbing electroclash jams (“Look What You Made Me Do”), ethereal chamber-folk ditties (“Willow”) and steamy R&B ballads (“Lavender Haze”); sometimes the production piled on visual spectacle — as in “Blank Space,” during which her dancers rode illuminated bikes out of “Tron” — while other times you realized you were just watching a bunch of people sitting around making music, as in “Betty.”
Tonally, too, the music covered an enormous amount of ground, from the fresh-faced yearning of “You Belong With Me” to the sly self-loathing of “Anti-Hero” to the epic journey of disillusionment that is “All Too Well (10 Minute Version).” Yet as nimbly as Swift was moving through emotional registers, she also was making you think about the durability of her songs: She used to sing “22” like a kid wanting to feel grown-up; here, she sang it like a grown-up longing to feel young.
Physical endurance was another theme of the Eras tour, which isn’t to say that Swift didn’t want you to see her sweat; instead, she seemed to revel in the demonstration of her hard work, nowhere more so than in an outraged “But Daddy I Love Him,” which she sang with her damp hair matted to her face like Bruce Springsteen rounding the final bend of “Jungleland.”
During her last nightly acoustic set, Swift mashed up “Long Live” — great example of a pop song where the star could be singing about a lover or her audience — with “New Year’s Day” and a bit of “The Manuscript,” which closes the deluxe edition of “Tortured Poets.” (Think of that choice as a neat bookend to Swift’s having performed “Tim McGraw,” the first song on her debut, as an acoustic number on Eras’ opening night in Arizona.)
Swift finished the tour’s final show the way she finished every other date: with a run through half a dozen tunes from 2022’s “Midnights,” which is the album that brought her back on the road in the first place after a long stretch away during the pandemic. But as her band revved up “Karma,” she offered one more valedictory thought, thanking her fans for “being a part of the most thrilling chapter of my entire life to date — my beloved Eras tour.”
You had to smile at “to date.”
