(Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management) Getty Images for TAS Rights Mana The city of Glendale, Arizona was ceremonially renamed to Swift City for March 17-18 in honor of The Eras Tour. Taylor Swift performs material from “Reputation” onstage for the opening night of “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour” at State Farm Stadium on Main Glendale, Arizona. (Swift’s own pre-recorded stacked background vocals just about always blend in with what she and the backup singers are doing, as any listener will notice.) It’s reimagining the visuals that she cherishes, and to that end, there was no shortage of all-new production design, costuming and choreography. Apart from the handful of solo songs, the music sounds almost exactly as it did on the records, even when it is freshly played by a band visible on either end of the widest big screen in the land. And so on since Swift is rarely one to explain herself any more via interviews, one does spend a lot of time wondering how the gears came to churn the way they do in something like this.Ī certain type of fan might wish she would reinvent some of her catalog music for the purpose of touring, but the star who has rendered her “Taylor’s Version” renditions as exact soundalikes has never see arrangement-tweaking as much of a priority. If her two most popular albums are “Fearless” and “1989,” one would need to be placed near the beginning and one almost at the end, for further bookending’s sake. Swift considers the like-minded 2020 releases “Folklore” and “Evermore” to be separate “eras,” at least for the purposes of this outing, so their segments thus needed to be placed well apart in the setlist, less anyone spend too lengthy a single part of the show peering at forested backdrops.
It made sense for the seven songs from the still hot-off-the-presses “Midnights” to be the last in the set - that album’s emphasis on heavy electronic programming directly preceded, for symmetry’s sake, by an acoustic-piano solo version of “Tim McGraw,” the sole pick from 2006’s “Taylor Swift.” It also made sense for the concert to kick off with a bunch of songs from the last album in a pure pop vein that is not the new one, “Lover,” to start the show. Given how schematic the overall concept is, there was a savviness to which album came at what point in the show, apparent only from thinking backwards from the finale. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management) Getty Images for TAS Rights Mana Taylor Swift performs “The Man” onstage for the opening night of “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour” at State Farm Stadium on Main Glendale, Arizona. It’s a gambit that probably no one of her stature has ever tried to pull off on a big tour before: going through an entire prolific catalog, one album at a time, non-chronologically but exhaustively … a greatest-hits set, more or less, yes, but an audacious one. For a couple of the albums, her 2006 debut and (curiously) “Speak Now,” the mini-set for that record amounts to just one song, but the other eight each get a considerable amount of stage time. “Their names are ‘Lover,’ ‘Folklore,’ ‘Evermore’ and ‘Midnights.’” The setlist showed a numerical bias toward the four newbies, but all 10 of her studio albums - not counting re-records - get their own isolated segment in this career-surveying show. And not just “the new ones.” As Swift reminded a crowd that needed little reminding a ways into Friday night’s tour opening, “We added four new members to the family” since everyone last convened for the “Reputation” tour in 2018. The elders in their midst might just call it Springsteenian.īefore the tour was announced and put on sale last November, the question on most fans’ minds since about mid-pandemic was: When Swift returns to touring, which album, or albums, is she going to be more or less touring behind for the next cycle? The ingenious answer was: all of them.
For anyone in her audience who hasn’t yet crossed the bridge into middle age, this show may be like having their lives flash before their eyes, at curfew-pushing length. For the purposes of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, these past personas are all very much alive, because what died didn’t stay dead, and… well, quoting lyrics will only get you so far in describing a show that may best first be characterized by its essential stats: 44 songs in 192 minutes. All the old Taylors came to the phone Friday night at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.
0 kommentar(er)
