After Taylor Swift brought her Eras Tour to a historic finish in Vancouver on Sunday, Dec. 8, 23-year-old Miami, FL, resident Lloyd laid in bed in her hotel room, smiling to herself. She was watching videos of herself singing the same Swift songs in concert, a year and a half apart; first in Philly on night two, and then again in Vancouver on night three.
“The last time I went, I was not in the best place mentally,” Lloyd says, sitting in the Vancouver airport on Monday morning. “I was really struggling with my body image, I was really struggling with this break up. I kind of shut my emotions off.” But a lot can change in a couple years.
We’ve seen Swift evolve as both performer and public persona in that span of time. She’s moved on from old relationships and embraced new ones. She’s dropped three albums, with 42 newly-released songs since March 2023. The Eras Tour itself has evolved, in setlist, costume, and vibe. Fans make side-by-side edits of Swift on night one in Glendale, Arizona, compared to later Eras dates, particularly of “Vigilante Shit.” It’s in the way she moves, somehow more confident, more fully in her body, than ever.
Nearly two years, 149 shows, 445 surprise song performances, countless outfit color predictions and grainy live streams and friendship bracelets. The Taylor Swift who started this tour in the wake of lingering pandemic uncertainty around live shows and speculation about her six-year relationship with her now ex Joe Alwyn is not quite the same one who ended this tour owning the stage like she lived there — and sang “Karma is the guy on the Chiefs” for Travis Kelce one final time (for now).
As the Eras Era comes to an end, her fans are reflecting on those changes, but even more so on their own lives: two years is a blip in the long arc of the universe, but it’s enough time to radically shift a person’s life.
Since those early Eras Tour days, Lloyd has graduated from college, moved to a new city, and received treatment for an eating disorder. “I was literally in my worst spot that I've ever been in my life,” she says, “and then to come out on the other side of that and be able to travel here with all of the skills that I learned and just like knowing that she also has struggled with [body image] and that's helped me stay motivated … last night when I was singing along, I just felt an overwhelming sense of pride for myself for just how far I've come.”
“I feel like everyone says this and Gracie said this last night, but I just felt so seen by her,” Lloyd adds.
As part of her last opening set on the Eras Tour, Gracie Abrams — who has herself experienced immense growth in fanbase and performance style over the past two years — read a prepared speech for the roaring crowd in BC Stadium on Dec. 8.
“Like all of you, I [was] brought up with Taylor’s songs,” Abrams said on stage, moments before tens of thousands of fans would scream along to her first Grammy-nominated song, “Us,” which features Swift. “Magically meeting a moment in my life that I didn’t think anyone else could understand or know or ached or yearned or loved or lost, and yet she did. How are we supposed to have the words for it? We don’t yet. But I do know that we have each other, thanks to Taylor, her music, her generosity, her curiosity, her wild and unparalleled pen, her superpower of seeing into our lives and creating soundtracks for every single formative moment we’ve had and that we will have.”
That sense of community, fans note, is one of the great evolutions of the Eras Tour over time. Trading friendship bracelets, creating new fan chants that went on to be part of the show’s canon, host cities attempting to outdo each other over and over. My Delta flight to Vancouver was full of strangers actually speaking to each other. Clad in Taylor Swift merch, they conversed about live streams and countdowns and reputation (Taylor’s Version) theories.
“When I was 19, I went to opening night by myself and was just, like, really shy. I didn't think people would trade bracelets with me,” says Karly, now a 21-year-old Los Angeles resident. “I'm more confident going up to people [now] … I've been less shy about sharing my love for Taylor, in person and on social media, and [have been] making friends because of her and her music.”
Chicago friends Lyla and Anabelle, both 12, attended the last night in Vancouver together. It was their first Taylor Swift concert, though they’ve seen a few live streams. Both feel like she’s grown a lot during this time — “I really enjoy, like, seeing how much she interacts with her dancers and all her outfits,” Anabelle says — and have noticed growth in themselves, too. “My interests have changed and I don't know, I've met new friends, I've gotten closer with people. I've switched away from people,” Lyla says.
They’ll have a soundtrack for those changes, for this era of their lives. Friendships made and lost and celebrated, breakups and new relationships, new schools and jobs and cities and adventures. We all will.
In March 2023, I flew to Glendale for opening night with my sister Marianne, fresh off five dates with a man I’d been interested in who wasn’t actually that into me. That trip was about shaking off a bit of rejection. But it was also about sisterhood — the culmination of all the times Marianne and I sang “All Too Well” or discussed Swift lore for hours, an ode to how much we’ve bonded over her music.
A couple months later, I took the train to Philly to attend night 2 with my best friend of 20 years, Kristin. I had just met a cute guy at a club who would be my boyfriend in a few months, albeit briefly. I was in the throes of infatuation and idealizing a crush, spinning around and feeling desired. I stood next to Kristin and thought about our teenage selves, how happy they’d be that our friendship had withstood mystical time, how much they’d think their dreams had come true, love and success and Taylor Swift all wrapped up together.
A year after that, I traveled to a Stockholm show with Marriott. The boyfriend — coincidentally, also a Peter who didn’t want to grow up —was long gone, but I’d struggled to fully move on. I’d changed apartments and wasn’t having a great time and had just sent a “let’s be friends” text to a girl I’d been seeing who might have been great for me. I felt unsure of myself. I watched as Swift brought The Tortured Poets Department into the setlist — the weirder, darker sheen it brought to the Eras Tour right when I felt weirder and darker.
TTPD is flawed, but it’s also sharply honest, despairing, impassioned. The writing of a woman who said “f*ck it” and then found she still gave every single f*ck, still cared what people thought of her, still needed to control these swirling narratives. She played “Peter” as a surprise song on piano to the most silent, rapt stadium audience I’ve ever experienced, and I thought of everyone who’s hurt me and everyone I’ve hurt, this relentless circle of pain and healing.
And then this past weekend I arrived in Vancouver, in many ways more content in myself than I’ve been all year. A cute new apartment, some little romantic dates, the life back in my eyes. I stood with the fans who didn’t have tickets outside BC Place on night two, singing along to “Cruel Summer” in the chilly Vancouver air. One group all seemed to have known each other for years — but only two had been IRL friends before. They’d all just found each other in the cold and clicked.
“I'm gonna look back when I'm 80 and be like, I was at the Eras Tour. I was there with all of these fun people during this two year period of my life,” says Jenna, 25, of Langley, BC. Adds Laura, 25, also of Langley: “To know that I was in this period and got to see it is just incredible. Stories I'm going to tell my children and my grandchildren.” Adrian, 39, of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Brooke, 30, of Houston, TX, nod in agreement. “Just listening to you guys like it just makes me a little emotional,” Brooke says. “Like, ‘it was rare, I was there,’ you know?”
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On night three, I watched — from inside the stadium this time — as Swift took pure delight in the experience of it all. As she and dancer Kameron Saunders hugged and exchanged “I love yous” during his “Bejeweled” dance break, as she and her fellow performers group-hugged for a long moment at the end of “Karma.” The euphoria, the memories, all captured with a surprise song setlist that included “Long Live,” “New Year’s Day,” and “The Manuscript.” Ending on a lyric Swift might have written for just this occasion: “But the story isn’t mine anymore.” She’s left it to us.
Lloyd brought her copy of the newly-released Eras Tour book to the show, packing it in her clear plastic bag along with some gold Sharpies. She shows me what it looks like now: the front entirely covered with signatures from fans she’d met, most of them while sitting in the seats where you couldn’t even see Swift half the time, signed like a yearbook.
“I'm going to put this in my apartment,” Lloyd says. “I'll have this forever.”
