This past weekend Taylor Swift came to Seattle as a part of her Eras Tour. Swift performed two separate three hour sets on Saturday July 22 and Sunday July 23. Both concerts were opened by Gracie Abrams and HAIM who each performed about a 30 minute set. Abrams’ set included songs such as “Where do we go now?”, “21”, ” Block Me Out”, “I should hate you”, “I know it won’t work”, and “I miss you, I’m sorry”. the HAIM sister’s set included “Now I’m in It”, “My Song 5”, “Want You Back”, “I’m Gonna Be Hungover” (as a reference to the music video they did with Taylor Swift), “The Wire”, “Gasoline”, and “The Steps”.

While performing at Lumen Field in Seattle, Taylor Swift broke attendance records as 72,171 fans attended the Saturday show beating the previous record held by U2 which held about 70,000 people in 2011. Swift is also the first female headline to ever perform two consecutive nights at Lumen Field in it’s history, selling out the stadium. During her night one performance, Swift revealed to the audience that during her Reputation tour back in 2018 she made a diary entry at the end of the show stating that Seattle, Washington was the best show she had ever played.

The way Swift’s show is set up is it’s meant to take you through different eras of her music, hence the name “The Eras Tour”. Swift currently has 13 albums, including her three rereleased albums “Fearless”, “Red”, and most recently “Speak Now”. She opens up the show with her Lover era, with the “Lover” album being released in 2019. For this album to be the opening made sense because Swift’s Lover world tour called “Lover Fest” was cancelled after the pandemic hit. She performed six songs from this album on night one and night two which were “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince”, “Cruel Summer”, “The Man”, “You Need To Calm Down”, “Lover”, and “The Archer”.

The next era Swift takes us through is her “Fearless” era. This was the first album to get rereleased under “Taylor Version”. This album originally premiered in 2009 and was rereleased in 2021. She performed three songs from this album each night with the songs being “Fearless”, “You Belong With Me”, and “Love Story”.

After Fearless, Swift moves onto her “evermore” era. For her past shows, Swift has opened this era with a song called “’tis the damn season”, but with one of her opening acts switching from MUNA to the HAIM sisters, Swift decided to change the opening song to one featuring the HAIM sisters called “no body, no crime”, after that she performed “willow”, “marjorie”, “champagne problems”, and “tolerate it”. She also took this time to shout out her new keys player within her band, Karina DePiano.

The calmness of the “evermore” era is quickly short lived as Swift transitions into her next era, “reputation” where she performed four songs.  This era opened up with “…Ready For It?” the album opener and was followed with “Delicate”, “Don’t Blame Me”, and “Look What You Made Me Do”. This was the last of her albums to be bought by Scooter Braun (check out the article “What does (Taylor’s Version) mean” to learn about his importance in Swift’s journey on rereleasing her music).

Once the “reputation” era is over, Swift moves on to her shortest era, “Speak Now” with two songs. This album was rereleased under “(Taylor’s Version)” on July 7 and this era originally only contained one song, “Enchanted”, but with the new release, Swift has added the song “Long Live” to the “Speak Now” era, bringing back her classic koi fish guitar and paying tribute to when the album and the song was first released.

After “Speak Now”, Swift moves onto the “Red” era of the tour. This era contained four songs which were “22”, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, “I Knew You Were Trouble”, and “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”. Swift kept up her tradition at both shows of giving away the hat she’s wearing during the song “22” to a fan, usually in exchange for a friendship bracelet.

With the conclusion of “Red”, Swift continues onto the longest era of the tour , “folklore”. This was the first of the two album she released during quarantine, with this tour being the first opportunity for her to perform these songs live. Opening with one of the songs “Seven” as a spoken poem, she moved onto “the 1”, “betty”, “the last great american dynasty”, “august”, “illicit affairs”, “my tears ricochet”, and “cardigan”. During this era, Swift explains how most of the songs she writes are autobiographical, so for this album she wanted to explore creating stories for different characters, which lead to the creation of the “folklore” love triangle with the songs “betty”, “august”, and “cardigan”.

One costume change later, next up was the “1989” era containing five songs which were “Style”, “Blank Space”, “Shake It Off”, “Wildest Dreams”, and “Bad Blood”. This era contained a little bit of surprise concerning the song “Bad Blood” as fire was set off into the night during the song.

The next segment of the concert was one that most fans had been anticipating. In each concert, Swift has been performing two surprise songs that don’t repeat unless she messes them up. One of the biggest questions before each concert has been “what are the surprise songs going to be?”. Night one, the surprise songs were “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” from the album “reputation” and “Everything Has Changed” from “Red”. Night two the surprise songs were “Message in a Bottle”, which was on the rerelease of “Red” as one of the tracks “From the Vault”, and “Tied Together With a Smile” from her debut album “Taylor Swift”.

Closing out the night Swift performed her final and newest era, “Midnights”. She performed “Lavender Haze”, “Anti-Hero”, “Midnight Rain”, “Vigilante S**t”, “Bejeweled”, “Mastermind”, and closed out the night with “Karma”. Swift’s performance lasted for around three hours and 25 minutes on Saturday and about three hours and 15 minutes after an unexpected delay on Sunday.

The Eras Tour recently added some international dates with Swift going to South America, Asia, Australia, and Europe throughout 2024. Overall, the tour is expected to bring in about $1 billion in revenue making it one of the highest grossing tours not only of 2023, but of all time.