“We are going to die by sequins and screams,” my editor texted me as he approached Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour show Tuesday night at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium. He was right to worry. The reflective glow of shiny fast-fashion dresses worn by blond girls, their blond moms, and a slightly more diverse subset of attendees than the singer’s Reputation Tour could be seen blocks away, in what seemed to be the agreed-upon and accessible, if obvious, sartorial interpretation of the Midnights track “Bejeweled.”
The allure of a Swift performance has little to do with the traditional qualities that draw people to live shows. She’s honed her voice into a reliable instrument, but no one’s sobbing over her vibrato the way Adele fans do. Several songs in Tuesday’s set that tested her higher range, such as “Wildest Dreams,” betrayed her dependence on a backing track to do the heavy lifting.
Similarly, Swift didn’t join her capable backup dancers in the choreography so much as suggest certain steps alongside them. Launching into “The Man,” she pointed to her bicep in one of the night’s many goofy but endearingly affectionate gesticulations. “You make me feel strong!” she announced, ensuring that the point of the empowerment anthem wasn’t lost on anyone.
Swift may no longer peddle the myth that she’s just like the girls in her audience, but she’s still asserting that you can be a total cornball and the biggest pop star in the world at the same time. Dwarfed by her surroundings, she often let the show’s immaculate production design speak for itself. An early set piece in which dancers ascended and descended on various platforms in a recreation of a skyscraper’s offices was a more imaginative, dynamic use of the leading-edge tech employed during Rihanna’s Tetris-like Super Bowl show.
There’s no prop as hilarious and subversive as the giant animatronic snake that accompanied Swift five years ago on her last tour, a liberating reclamation of the villain role she’d been assigned by the media. But her ability to seamlessly weave together material from 10 disparate albums, capturing her mind from 16 to 33 years old, into something resembling a coherent narrative is impressive. The pastel hues and jitterbug-like dancing of the opening Lover section foreshadowed the naïvete of Fearless’s title track and “You Belong with Me,” calling back to an earlier Swift with the kind of bittersweet distance of flipping through a family photo album.
The singer introduced the jarring shift to the stripped-down, storybook-like folk-pop of Folkmore and Evermore with the disclaimer that its songs, written during the height of the Covid pandemic, weren’t built for a stadium. Unfortunately, she’s right. “Champagne Problems” fared best, with its rousing hooks and delectable chorus. Around the midpoint of the roughly three-and-a-half-hour set (Springsteen would be proud), it was the only point when otherwise rapt audience members stirred, ostensibly waiting to get onto the Midnights stuff.
But gorgeous surprises weren’t in short supply. Swift is always most effective when playing against expectations. “The Archer,” a minimalist ballad with largely electronic instrumentation, turned out to be a sneaky banger. She panted the self-lacerating lyrics—“Who could ever leave me, darling?/But who could stay?”—with the desperation of a Catholic confessional. It was capped with a searing guitar solo and a fiery shower of gold sparks to rival any prog-rock act.
As for the self-proclaimed “surprise” songs baked into the Eras Tour formula: “I Know Places,” an attempt at darker, Lorde-style goth pop, has always been an odd fit for Swift. On the other hand, “King of My Heart” has aged well: Peeling back the original fussy Max Martin and Shellback production, she tore into the Reputation fan favorite on steel guitar, revealing something personal and physical, truly of her “body and soul.”
At times, those conventional performative techniques that critics love to focus on fell exactly into place. But in general, the effect of this tour was more akin to a magic trick: a testament to Swift’s seemingly impossible grip on her audience. People weren’t here for something as pedestrian as a concert. They came for a world-shifting event. On that count, she delivered.
In a moment of wonder, at one point, Swift removed her in-ear monitors, daring the audience to shred any prior decibel records. The guttural response was nearly inhuman, resulting in an eight-minute standing ovation. “That’s deeply abnormal and beautiful,” Swift said, before acknowledging that what she had summoned on this night was maybe a little unhinged: “That was insane, that was crazy. I’m trying to get control of my brain.” She wasn’t alone.
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