I Skipped the Eras Tour, But I Can't Help Writing About Taylor Swift

So what if she was just a baby in the '90s?

First, a quick update: I started this Substack in a burst of post-New Year enthusiasm, vowing to write once a week about an underappreciated decade for music. I got two whole posts up before discovering that Rob Harvilla was doing the same thing, only better and funnier, with his “60 Songs That Explain the 90s” podcast. Poof went my creative inspiration… until now.

The first and only time a Taylor Swift song made me cry, I was stopped at a red light on the way home from a Costco/Target/Aldi run. Swift’s newest single, “Lover,” came on the radio, and I started listening to the lyrics.

Can we always be this close?

All’s well that ends well to end up with you…

The dreamy world Swift described—vignettes of a young couple creating a life together—were so removed from my own reality that I felt crushed with regret. Taylor Swift was beautiful and talented and famous and blissfully in love with a handsome British actor—and I was a dowdy, unbeloved mother of three teenagers, sitting in her minivan and sniffling back tears.

To be fair, crying jags were a staple of my hormonal middle age. And the sarcastic Gen-Xer in me winced at the term “lover,” which I’ll always associate with Rachel Dratch and Will Ferrell’s cringy Saturday Night Live academic duo.

But hearing that particular song on that particular day, I was convinced that Taylor Swift had found the perfect guy and was well on her way to happily ever after.

I was wrong.

***

The Eras Tour was self-consciously extra from the start: all those cities, all those costume changes; the three-and-a-half hour running time. By the time it ends tonight in Vancouver, Swift will have performed 149 concerts across five continents.

Throughout that time, my social media feeds churned out photos and reels of giddy women pre- and post-concert. As the mother of an early-twentysomething, I felt contractually obligated to go, until my daughter said she wasn’t particularly interested (and I saw the ticket prices). What really interested me was the behind-the-scenes drama: Since the beginning of the tour in early 2023, Swift has ended a long-term relationship; had an intense will-they-or-won’t-they with a past crush; started dating a high-profile athlete; then released an album inspired by all of the above.

And much to my surprise, I found myself playing that album, The Tortured Poets Department, repeatedly since it came out. In many ways, it’s a classic heartbreak album; the song “So Long, London” was clearly inspired by Joe Alwyn, the “lover” I’d been certain was her Happily Ever After.

Was I shamefully relieved that the relationship I’d been so envious of wasn’t perfect? Yes. But the song’s shimmering melancholy and ethereal vocals summoned memories of my own romantic disappointments, decades in the past but still lodged inside my body like splinters beneath the skin. I no longer envied Swift. In fact, I wondered how she could get through the “Lover” era of her tour, night after night, knowing how it all ended.

I was also surprised—then impressed—by the way Swift skewers another kind of love in “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart.” It sounds like a classic stadium-pop banger, with the chants of a crowd as the background beat. But the lyrics tell a darker, show-must-go-on story, with the stiletto-heeled heroine hitting her stage marks despite having a breakdown:

Lights, camera, bitch smile, even when you want to die

Or,

I’m miserable—sung in a note of quivering near-mania—and nobody even knows!

It’s a song Swift wrote on the Eras Tour, about the emotional toll of the Eras Tour. What should we believe: Swift’s enthusiastic smiles on the Jumbotron screens, or her admission that she’s faking it?

If each Era on the tour represents a different stage of Swift’s life, it seems to me she’s finally reached middle age—musically, if not physically. She grits her teeth and gets on with what needs doing; she knows there’s no such thing as a perfect relationship. And though Swift mentions rings and weddings and cradles throughout The Tortured Poets Society, it’s notable that she remains an unmarried, self-described childless cat lady.

The lesson for me? Even the biggest pop star on the planet doesn’t have it all.