The scale of Taylor Swift’s influence was so great in 2024 that some of the most esteemed political thinkers in the world sincerely began to believe that if she endorsed a candidate she might actually swing the US election.
Has anybody ever been as famous as this? As ubiquitous? As prolific? She was midway through the highest-grossing concert tour in history, had released a surprise 31-song double album that dominated the charts in several countries and was conquering the world with her Super Bowl-winning boyfriend in tow. It was all-consuming – and unprecedented.
If it was hard to conceive she could get bigger by the end of 2023, during which she had already broken records with Eras, rereleased two of her re-recorded albums, been named Time magazine’s “person of the year”, and navigated two break-ups, in 2024 she became a monoculture.
She boosted economies, she transformed industries, she became a unifying force of joy, and whether you had a ticket or not, getting swept up in the frenzy was irresistible. Fans, celebrities, royals, dignitaries, and – infamously – politicians made the pilgrimage to behold her. Eras wasn’t just a concert, she wasn’t just a pop star – it felt like witnessing history. Capture it, remember it, as her song “Fearless” goes.
Would she risk her reign by talking politics? She had endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and supported Democratic candidates before, but the stakes were higher now and Eras was a fantastical, escapist bubble – no topical patter, no serious news – that didn’t even burst when she had to cancel three concerts in Vienna due to a terror threat or when three children were murdered at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport.
But in September, immediately after the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and to much celebration and relief, Swift uploaded a news-breaking post to Instagram declaring her support for the Harris-Walz ticket. Accompanying a photo of herself with her Ragdoll cat Benjamin Button draped around her neck, Swift called Harris a “steady-handed, gifted leader” and wrote: “I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm not chaos.” She championed Walz’s support of LGBTQ+ rights, IVF and a woman’s right to her own body. And as a retort to JD Vance’s infamous remark, she signed off “Childless Cat Lady”.
It was supposed to be funny – a bit of the self-aware Swift snark she’s long written into songs from “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” to “The Man”. But I was surprised by how moved I felt by the glimpse it offered of the adult woman, far away from the sparkly Eras phenomenon.
After 149 shows, 21 months, 19 countries, $2bn and a handful of diplomacy crises, Eras came to a close this December, in a stadium in Vancouver, five days before Swift’s 35th birthday. There were no special surprises, no big announcements, no superstar guests. There is no encore for Eras – just the world left wondering what she will do next.
How can she possibly do anything like this again? How will she possibly scale down? There’ll be more music, surely – she has put out four new studio albums in as many years and has yet to release her rerecorded versions of her 2006 debut and 2017’s Reputation. There’ll be a film – she’s contracted to direct a movie with Searchlight Pictures. Beyond that – will she start a record label? Start a family? Enter politics herself? Take a break?
Swift is an artist who thrives from reinvention and proving her sceptics wrong – she will not be intimidated. She has a superhuman work ethic and a ferocious sense of direction. The real adjustment will be for everyone else. Because now that the time-travelling Eras tour is over, the world must shift its perspective and take in Swift as an adult, and not the girly pop princess of her touring “era” – and accept that her trademark, universal relatability might not last for ever.
The concept of the Eras tour was masterful: an opportunity, after six years away from touring, to combine Swift’s five new albums with the five from her back catalogue – debuting new music and cementing her legacy. It was a spectacle of such staggering athleticism and stamina that it sufficiently challenged Swift herself, and its 46 songs guaranteed pure fan indulgence – whatever their age and whatever their defining “era”.
For fans who have listened to Swift’s music for the last 18 years of their lives, it was an incredibly powerful odyssey of nostalgia and emotion; for the casual or converted it was unmatched in its thrills and theatrical production. Its high-octane, hit-heavy setlist was designed to please the maximum possible audience and with each album’s distinctly defined visuals – purple floaty dresses for Speak Now, serpent necklaces for Reputation, sequin leotards for Midnights – dressing up became compulsory.
And every night, Swift dressed up too – as all the different women she had been. The teenage dreamer chanting “You Belong with Me”; the heartbroken 21-year-old writing her anguish into a 10-minute screed for the ages, the sexy, resentful, savage desperate to prove her righteousness to the world.
It’s a bolder act than it looks – most of us would rather die than be associated with the emotions, clothes, decisions of our teens and early 20s but Swift stepping into her past – literally, into the shoes and dance moves – dignified even the parts she was ashamed of and made them something in which others could find communion. This is why her music has always felt special – you see yourself in her songs or you grow up and find yourself there, and her excoriating honesty makes you feel understood.
But dressing up as her younger self several nights a week for nearly two years meant she was allowed to remain a little longer the girl everyone could relate to – that idol for new generations of little girls. And we were allowed to forget that Swift has grown up.
Swift’s last four albums have not been about princesses and white horses. On the acclaimed folklore, and its follow-up evermore, released in 2020, she moved to indie and to sophisticated ambitious narratives far from her own life.
On Midnights, in 2022, she moved back to expansive pop, but with a new, moody edge. Its concept was sleepless nights; it explored depression, self-hatred, regret, revenge, her own fame. Swift had the fairy tale life and love her earlier songs had wished for, but this album declared all was not happily ever after. As became clear when, a few months after its release, her relationship with Joe Alwyn broke down after six years, Midnights was a portrait of a restless woman trapped.
And then, this April, came The Tortured Poets Department – a 31-song double-album exorcism of a double break-up, first with Alwyn and then the rebound with The 1975’s Matty Healy, which appears to have left her even more broken.
Its reception was mixed – some called it meandering and messy, some called it her most vulnerable and exposed songwriting yet. It was a completely wounded outpouring, with few big pop hooks and occasional flashes of her old childlike, revenge-seeking anger. It was adult – it reflected her own age. It was much more sexually explicit, there was much more drinking, there were more references to drugs, it suggested her feelings about not yet having children, and it marked the first time she addressed her own fans and their judgment of her personal life.
It was an unexpected highlight of the Eras tour when it was introduced into the set list for the European leg – it was clever, funny, new, somehow turning the introspective lyricism into stadium-friendly set pieces that became the highest-energy parts of the night – and certainly, for Swift at least, the most cathartic.
It was raw, and the first time we were able to take in mid-30s Swift and what she was going through right now, up close. The Tortured Poets Department was about regression and existential fears. Where once she wrote of love, hope, fantasy with maturity, yes, but a degree of naiveté, now it was real-life regret, grown-up grief, actual lost time, and youth and opportunities passing her by.
It couldn’t not be alienating for some. A nine-year-old girl cannot understand how it feels when your friends reach the age that they “smell like weed or little babies”, a 15-year-old high schooler can’t grasp that there will come an age they feel they gave six years to a fated relationship and must prove to themselves it was not a waste. It is not catchy, it is not easy to sing along to, it is not “Marry me, Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone” or “I’ve got a blank space, baby, and I’ll write your name”.
