The End of an Era Episode 5 Recap: “Marjorie”

Podcast Episode: December 28, 2025

Episode Description

Episode 5 of Taylor Swift’s The End of an Era docuseries, titled “Marjorie,” narrates the family legacy that led Taylor to stardom.

Andrea Swift tells us the story of her mother, Marjorie Finlay, an opera singer whose love of music and desire to perform echo through Taylor’s life, work, and personality. Andrea also reveals how her relationship with her mother allowed her to foster Taylor’s career, and how the entire family came together to support her dream.

We also hear how the Swift “family business” expanded through the Eras Tour, creating a chosen family of performers, and what it feels like to have to say goodbye to that family as the tour draws to a close.

In Toronto, we get to see Taylor performing “Marjorie,” and hear about how the song became a collective space for grief and remembrance. Gracie Abrams also performs with Taylor, and we see the impact that her mentor has had on her life and career.

Together, these stories reveal The Eras Tour not just as a career milestone, but as the culmination of generations of love, risk, and devotion to art.

Listen to the Episode

Episode Transcript

“Are you ready to cry again over The Eras Tour and sob about Taylor Swift? I sure am. The final two episodes of The End of an Era have finally dropped, and today I’m so excited to relive episode 5 with you.

This episode is entitled Marjorie, and we get to hear so much about Taylor’s family and her mom and her grandma, and there’s so much new information and so much to talk about, so let’s dive right into our recap of episode 5. 

I had been grouping these recaps into blocks of two episodes, but as I sat down to write my thoughts for episode 5, it ended up being way longer than I anticipated. So I’m breaking these up into two parts, and today we’ll recap episode 5. Episode 6 will come shortly after, but oh my, these two episodes were incredibly powerful and there’s so much to talk about. 

Episode 5 Recap: “Marjorie”

Episode 5 is entitled Marjorie, who, if you know any Taylor lore, Marjorie Finlay was her grandmother for whom she named the song which was on the evermore album.

We open the episode with baby Taylor at the piano being encouraged by Marjorie, who looks so much like Taylor it’s uncanny. Taylor is pounding away on the keys – she’s probably a little over a year old – and Marjoie says to Taylor’s mom, “you know what this means, you’re gonna have to get a piano.” Little does Andrea know at this point, she’s gonna have to do a whole lot more than that. A piano is just the start. 

We get our title card, The End of an Era, Episode 5, “Marjorie”, so we get the sense that we’re once again going to be looking at the fate and destiny and kismet of it all in this episode, especially in relation to Taylor’s family, and her family plays a big part in this episode and in episode 6. 

Now we zoom over to Toronto, where Taylor is set to play 6 shows in this final leg of the tour, before going over to Vancouver in the next episode for the final 3 shows ever of the eras tour. Taylor is sitting at her keyboard, and she’s coughing. She says if she gets a cold, it lingers for a while, and Taylor, that’s because you don’t rest. I mean at this point, she doesn’t have the option to rest.

But she’s puttering around the dressing room, and asks her mom, would you like a coffee from the world’s most depressing coffee shop? They’re having this hilarious banter, and we can really see where Taylor got some of her humor from in these discussions with her mom. There’s talk about spatchcocking a turkey, which Taylor is kind of giggling at, and the two of them are just magical together. This is an amazing mother daughter relationship that I think we all envy. We learn that Travis is included in Thanksgiving, because Andrea is making him ribs that he refers to as dinosaur bones. 

So we’ve set the scene, right, this episode is all about family, and it’s not going to just be about Taylor’s family, but right now we’re focusing on them. We’re getting some clips of young Taylor, she’s maybe 12, getting ready for some of her first appearances. And in a voiceover, Taylor says, “Touring is something that really brings my family together in a lot of ways. For me, part of the Eras tour is a celebration of my family. Ultimately, I just don’t see any of this happening if my family hadn’t been involved. I mean, we work together, we’re kind of a family business for 20 years.” 

We’re still seeing clips of this very early touring, hopping around to festivals and state fairs and such, and it’s all hands on deck. Her brother is her stage hand, her mom is her stage manager, and her dad is probably behind the camera. And Taylor continues, “My parents didn’t know anything about the music industry, but they were like, yeah it’s hard, yeah, we know nothing about it right now. We’ll get some books and read. Like, it’s pretty insane.” 

And what she’s talking about here is that perfect combination of privilege, naivete, and blind optimism that allowed this quote-unquote family business to really take off. Privilege because they have the money and time to devote to their daughters’ dream, naivete because they don’t have the first clue how tough this business is and what they’re really up against, and blind optimism because they don’t see how slim the chances are that this ever works out, but they’re going to give it their all. And that’s really a testament to how much they love Taylor, and how much they believe in Taylor. Very, very few parents will devote one day to making sure their kids can attain their dreams, let alone devote their entire lives to making sure it happens. But these parents have, and it’s pretty remarkable. 

We see Andrea drawing the 13, Taylor’s lucky number, on Taylor’s hand in sharpie, which she used to do in her very early career. So now we’re into clips from a little later on, from her debut performances through Fearless and Speak Now. And Taylor Says, “In an industry as cutthroat as the music industry, learning hard lessons and experiencing ups and downs, and triumphs and failures, it was a huge challenge for my whole family, but everybody was so locked in for my whole life. They all banded together to like, “no, she wants this, we want this for her.”” During the second part of this voiceover, we transition to clips of The Eras Tour, so we’ve kind of seen the whole trajectory of Taylor’s career in just this short montage, but still focused on her family and how they’ve helped her get here. 

And now we get to hear more from Andrea, who plays a huge role in this episode, and she’s going to introduce how her mother, Marjorie Finlay, plays a role in this career trajectory. Andrea says, “this tour, it’s an honor to work on it. It’s a real privilege, and we know that, cause none of us would be doing anything that we’re really good at doing if it wasn’t for what she does that she’s incredibly good at doing.” 

Now during Andrea’s voiceover, we’re seeing clips of Eras rehearsals and backstage. We see Jan and Kam and Taylor’s dad Scott playing foosball in the dressing rooms, and we see more clips of Taylor with her family, with this extended Eras Tour family. Because it seems they all have really become one big family. So they’re connecting this nuclear family with the larger family, the crew, the dancers, the management, the stage hands, everyone. And Andrea continues, “It’s incredible fun, but mostly it’s a way for us to be together as a family and to sort of honor this thing we’ve committed our entire lives to.” 

I want to pause for a second and just reflect on this, because everything about this family, and this career that they’ve helped her build, is remarkable. Because think about the kind of bond, and the kind of level-headedness, that you need to maintain when your life hits this incredible level of success and fame. And it’s centered around one person, Taylor is the star, but her family is just there to support her, and none of them, it seems, get jealous of this spotlight that’s shone on her at all times. They love that she gets that, and continue to love that she gets that, and this could be an incredibly precarious situation for most families, right? Money and fame does very strange things to people and especially to family dynamics, but it hasn’t changed them in this case. 

But think about families like the Jacksons, the Presleys, the Phillips, the Cyrus family – that extreme level of fame and success comes at a cost, and often the cost is family ties and relationships. But not the Swifts. Even though Scott and Andrea are no longer married, this family was never separate, they are always together in life AND in business. And I think that’s a testament to all of them, being able to not only maintain this tight family unit, but always supporting one another. It’s a beautiful thing, really.

And it’s been so interesting in this doc to really see where Taylor gets her level of emotional maturity and keeps this even keel during a crazy life. I think her family both grounded her from the beginning, and helps keep her grounded, because they’re a constant when everything else changes. But that’s really down to all of them – all of them have to be on board and stay on board during what must be an absolutely hectic and trying life. But they’re together. They’re always together.  

So we’re backstage in Toronto, and Taylor is trying to figure out what she’s going to do with Gracie Abrams, and we get a little backstory on how the song Us, which was nominated for a grammy, came to be. Gracie was, of course, the opener on an earlier leg of the tour, and just like Sabrina, her career has since taken off. The Eras Tour was really a launching pad for many of these openers, which is so cool to see. Taylor says she went out with Gracie after one of the shows the year before, and they ended up “having a lot of drinks,” and not only did they set the table on fire, which we see this hilarious clip of, but they came up with this incredible song on this drunken night. 

So Taylor plans to bring Gracie out in Toronto, and mash up Us with Out of the Woods, which Gracie tells us is in her top 3 favorite songs of all time. So Taylor has sent this idea to Gracie in a voicenote, and we get Gracie’s reaction, which she’s just elated and amazed. But while Taylor is performing this little clip for Gracie, recording on her phone, we get this amazing clip of Andrea just rocking out on the sofa in the dressing room. It’s so cute and so sweet. She’s absolutely Taylor’s number one fan. 

Then we get to hear from Gracie, “It’s just insane. She just, like, can do that in her sleep. Where it’s like, I’m gonna chop up two to five songs and make them all flow,” And then Gracie’s tour manager says, “how does she mastermind that?” And Gracie replies, “I don’t know, cause she’s just a mastermind.” And Gracie is trying to remember how this mashup is going to go, she’s running through it like “me verse, me chorus, Taylor verse, Taylor chorus, Me bridge…” She goes on, like I don’t know how number one, Taylor can come up with this on the fly, and number two, how she can remember it in the moment. 

And this is something I’ve been really curious about – we’ve seen Taylor create these surprise song sets, but when she’s up there, is there someone in her ear reminding her? Or is it written down somewhere we can’t see? Or does she just memorize it? I can’t even fathom it. And neither can Gracie, she jokes, “catch me projectile vomiting on the eras stage.” 

Now we’re back to Taylor, and she’s playing clips of evermore, the title track. And we’re going to hear a lot of evermore songs in these final two episodes, which is fitting, because that album is really all about goodbyes and moving on. And then she mashes up evermore with Peter, and she jokes, “evermore and peter? Jesus.” She knows that mashup will be an absolute gut punch to the fans, and it absolutely was on Toronto night 2. Go back and watch that one – it’s a tearjerker. 

Then we hear from Andrea again, and she’s saying that she doesn’t know how Taylor does this. And not just the surprise songs, but all of it. The entire songwriting, performing thing in general. She says, “there wasn’t a creative bone in my body,” which is just not true, but she sees herself in comparison to Taylor, who is maybe the most imaginative creative person alive, we all look bland in comparison. Then we see clips of Andrea plucking at this banjo or something doing this really discordant, creepy sound, and she jokes that it’s like a soundtrack to a horror flick. It’s hilarious how Taylor is just like, “oh my god mom, stop.” 

But she goes on, “I was completely the opposite. I went into business in school.” Now it makes a bit more sense, we didn’t really know this about Andrea before, we hadn’t heard much about what her life was before Taylor’s career. And I did a little digging, because this got me curious.

Andrea Swift did get a degree in business, and was a “former mutual fund marketing executive” before Taylor’s career took off. We knew Taylor’s dad was a financial advisor, but we’ve never really heard Andrea talk about her career before Taylor Swift Inc. But when I was researching this, Google decided to tell me that Andrea was a “homemaker.” Um, Google, we’ve got beef. She’s not a homemaker. Maybe she was at one point, but she literally is a manager at 13 Productions, and she’s credited as a producer on most things that Taylor puts out. So homemaker? No, dude. 

But now, getting this context about Andrea, it’s all making a bit more sense – not only are her parents incredibly supportive, and had the means to help make this happen for her, but they had experience. Not in the music industry per se, but in marketing and business in general. So that was probably a huge help, especially in the beginning. But Andrea, as it turns out, did kind of have experience in the music business, as we’re about to learn.  

She continues, “I don’t have a musical background or play instruments, but I do have this sort of intimate knowledge of the psyche of someone who really has to do this.” And it’s important to note there that she didn’t say “wants to” do this. She says “has to.” It’s a need. It’s a must, and it seems she understood that with Taylor, because of her mom. She tells us, “It goes back to my mother, Marjorie.”

We get some clips of Marjorie singing, and Andrea says, “She was an opera singer.” She tells us that Marjorie was always into music and wanted to perform, and she studied music in college, started out doing live radio in New York, and as they moved around, she’d star in local operas wherever they were living. We see some old photos of Marjorie, and especially when she’s younger, she’s the spitting image of Taylor. Also, what does this photo remind you of? It looks like a mashup of Elizabeth Taylor and Taylor Swift. Marjorie is also very tall, she also has these striking eyes, and Andrea tells us, “everywhere we went, she was absolutely beloved.” Sound familiar? The parallels are paralleling here, so we’re really diving into this lineage, and how it’s in Taylor’s blood. 

She talks about growing up with this kind of mother, who was built to perform, and she tells us that on the way home from performances, “I remember she would say to me, So Andrea, during that part of the delivery, did it make you wanna cry? You know, she was always looking for feedback, you know, from an 8 year old, about opera.”

But we can see the psyche of Marjorie here, right? Not only does she want to perform and need to perform, she always has to get better. She always has to climb the mountain and make it to the top. She’s a perfectionist, and if you wondered where Taylor got it from, it’s right here. 

She continues, “it was a beautiful relationship I had with my mom, but it was all with a full awareness that my mom was this person who loved singing, who loved to perform, and that people love.” Does that also describe her relationship with her daughter? Yes. It seems she’s given birth to a clone of her own mother, and it’s because of this relationship with her mom that she recognized that quality in Taylor that – she has to do this. She’s a performer. So as a mom, she just pulls up her bootstraps and makes it happen. 

We now see another clip of Taylor and Marjorie at the piano, and this time Taylor is about 2 years old. Andrea says in a voiceover, “so it began with my mother, and I think that prepared me, probably better than anything that could have for having a child like Taylor.” 

Now we’re seeing clips of Taylor performing for her family in the living room, and Andrea is setting up her mic. Her voiceover continues, saying that Taylor “pretty much wanted to follow in my mother’s footsteps. Taylor always knew she wanted to perform, and she was already writing her own music without any co-writers.” 

We see a little montage of Taylor in her adolescence, she’s not even a teenager yet, and she’s saying “this is a song I wrote yesterday,” “this is a song I wrote like a week ago.” So we can see she was basically born like this, with the ability to write and perform, and also her memory was always this good, because she’s not looking at a notebook. She’s just singing a song she just wrote, from memory. 

Andrea continues, “And then at 11 is when Taylor looked at me and said, we gotta go to Nashville. Please, please take me to Nashville. That is where Faith Hill went.” 

I covered this in my timeline of Taylor Swift’s career video, in part 1, but Taylor was always a Faith Hill and Tim McGraw fan, and she had watched a VH1 documentary on Faith Hill, and that’s where she was really inspired to go to Nashville. 

Now we’re in Nashville, through these old home movies. They’re driving around to the different record labels on music row, and Andrea’s voiceover continues, “very quickly, I realized this is where my past with my mother was gonna really, really come into play. I think Taylor wanted to experience something that she thought was, I hate to say the word, but destiny.” 

There it is. There has been so much about fate, and karma, and destiny, and kismet in this documentary in all episodes, but here’s where we hear it for the first time: Taylor knew she was destined for this from the very beginning. There was something in her that just knew, and she was just incredibly lucky to have a family that could help facilitate this. 

Now we’re seeing a clip of Taylor performing at the iconic Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. If you are a songwriter who wants to be discovered, this is the place to go. And this is really where it happened for Taylor. It’s November 4, 2004, and she’s playing at an RCA records showcase. She’s already signed an artist development deal at this point, but she feels stagnant, like she’s not getting anywhere. But on this particular night, that we now see video from, there is someone in the audience named Scott Borchetta.

This is the very night where Big Machine records was born, with one artist signed to his brand new label, 15 year-old Taylor Swift. This is what set the dominoes in motion, both for better and for worse. Borchetta will become a father figure, he’ll make a deal with the devil, but then the protege will become the master. Now that Taylor finally regained ownership of her life’s work, showing us this clip has particular significance. It’s where it both began and ended.  

“I do think that at a very young age,” Andrea’s voiceover continues, “we tend to know where we’re going in life. And it’s good to listen to them, and where their dreams are even at that age.” she says. This moment made me super emotional because this is the make or break moment for kids. You tell your big dreams to your parents, and they can either listen, like Andrea did, or they can shut you down.

And for many kids, this would be the moment their hopes and dreams would be crushed. Your parents would tell you it’s impractical, or you’ll never get there, it’s impossible, and maybe you should focus on a more realistic dream. But if you do listen, and you do everything in your power to nurture your kids, no matter how far out their desires are, you might end up with a Taylor Swift. Not a pop star, necessarily, but a kid who blossoms. A kid who is comfortable in their own skin, and a kid who is comfortable fostering creativity and pursuing what their heart wants. 

Now we zoom over to another little kid’s dreams who were made a reality by supportive parents, and we’re with Amanda Balen in her hometown of Toronto. And Amanda’s parents are very similar to Taylor’s, they saw this little girl’s dreams, and they did everything they could to make it happen. She’s sitting around the table with her family and they’re looking over her childhood drawings and school work, and she reads aloud this old school project, “my mom takes me to dancing, and sometimes my dad does.” And they’re all laughing, and she says, “thanks for sometimes taking me, dad. Thanks for always taking me, mom.”

So it’s this similarly sweet moment where we see parents supporting their kids, and especially supporting kids in the arts, which is difficult when as an adult you live in the real world, and you know the realities of how hard it will be. But doing it anyway, and allowing your kid that creativity and that freedom and being open to the possibilities anyway, that’s what allows careers like this and people like this. 

We learn that after the eras tour, Amanda is going to end her dance career. In an earlier episode, we learned that she came out of retirement to dance in the tour, because she’d had injuries, and she was just doing choreo, and came onto the tour as a choreographer. Then they asked her to dance, and she said yes, because what an opportunity. But the final shows of the eras tour will also be the final shows of Amanda’s career, and she’s doing it in her hometown, and her family gets to be there, which is very sweet. 

We are now backstage in the huddle before the first Toronto show. There are 6 shows in Toronto left, and then the final 3 in Vancouver. And the team is already getting emotional, and we zoom over to Amanda again, this time in the huddle, and she’s reflecting on what this ending really means, both for her and for the whole team. By the way, I love that each eras tour family member gets their moment to lead this huddle. It’s not always Taylor, and that’s also what makes a great leader and a great boss, is allowing everyone to have a voice, and creating a space where everyone’s voice matters. 

Amanda says to Taylor, “You are all things kindness and all things grace.” And when she says, “grace,” Taylor kind of smirks, like umm I’m not graceful. But Amanda continues, “And absolutely, my life is different from now moving forward because of you.” Taylor’s tears start flowing, everyone’s tears are flowing, they do their f-shit up cheer, and they go out to Toronto night 1. We see Amanda’s family cheering her on and sobbing, and it’s very sweet. 

And now we go back over to Andrea. We see older clips of older tours, and Andrea’s voiceover says, “for Taylor, it’s always been about the audience. Making sure that she felt an intimate connection with them. Meeting people, talking to them, hugging them.” And I have to say, that’s one thing that is really singular about Taylor, is that she has always, always fostered a connection with her fans and fostered a community with her fans. It began with these secret messages in the liner notes in her debut album, which really drew us in, and now it’s blossomed into all of this.

It began with Taylor, because she invited that connection. And doing things like the secret sessions, that’s incredible for an artist of her scale to do, to meet with fans not only personally, but in this intimate way where she’s sharing her art with them, that’s singular. That’s remarkable. And we get the sense that Taylor has always known that the fans make this all possible, and she is grateful for us.

We connected with her because that’s what she wanted, and that’s what she created, was this space where we felt like we were a part of it. Most artists don’t do this. And I think that’s why the Swifties are such a unique and incredible group, because of the tone that Taylor has set, she’s framed her music and lyrics as things that unite us, because she’s writing about her own personal emotions but she writes about it in a way that makes them universal emotions. So she’s not just writing about herself, she’s writing about all of us. 

But meeting us in person? Pretty unheard of for an artist of that scale, and as she’s grown, she’s had to scale that back, both because of Covid and just because of security. But they found a way around that, and the way around – to still have intimate connections with the audience in a stadium of 90,000 people – is with production design. 

We see some older clips of Taylor meeting with fans, and then we get a voiceover from her. “I decided that if I couldn’t meet with fans in the crowd, in the show, then I have to come up with different ways to still give people an intimate experience.” So now we’re getting into the design of the whole thing, and we meet the man behind the scenes, Ethan Tobin, who Taylor had previously worked with in music videos.

He tells us, “I like to build worlds around a storyteller, their relationship with the fans, our relationship with the songs. If every idea that you have creates an emotional response, you are able to make people in the last row feel like they’re in the first row.” So what he’s saying, essentially, is if you can’t physically reach people – if you can’t be close to them – then you bring the show to them on an emotional level. That can still reach them, no matter how far up in the nosebleeds they are, because even if they can’t see it up super close, they can feel it. 

Taylor says, “I wanted to make sure that the show was accessible from every part of the stadium.” And then we get to hear from more of the team as to how they made that possible. We meet Baz Halpin, the lighting and production designer, who is describing this predicament: you make the stage light up so the people even on the top row get this incredible view. But the people at floor level can’t see the lit up floor, so you get a camera that goes over the top and projects it on the big screen. So he’s just described how they created this sort of 360 degree view where everyone can see and feel all of it, which is a really hard thing to accomplish in huge stadiums. But they did it. And the combination of lighting and cinematography and these huge screens projecting every angle, it makes you feel like you can see up close, even when you can’t. 

And then Taylor tells us about probably the most unique moment on stage, and that’s the stage dive. She asked Ethan to pull some wild card stuff, “I want there to be a moment where the fans are like, ‘what just happened?’” The first time we saw that, that was exactly our reaction. Jaws on the floor. 

So she’s about to practice the stage dive, and the first thing she asks is, “I wonder how that looks from the top.” So she’s thinking about what the nosebleeds are going to see at all times, she’s thinking about every angle, and her team is thinking about every angle. And then we get to see what this looks like in the daylight, and it’s really cool. Under the stage is a type of lift, just like the other platform lifts we got to see, but it’s like a cradle filled with big air-filled cushions, so she dives in and it’s totally padded, then it lowers her down so she can climb off and journey under the stage to the quick change. It’s really ingenious. 

Then we’re seeing fan reactions to this stage dive happening during one of the Toronto shows, and we hear Ethan’s voiceover, “people scream, it’s happening right in front of your eyes, and that creates joy. And that’s, I think what great shows do: make adult feel like children.” So that segways into really the storytelling of the tour, and what we all felt while watching it. Because we did feel like kids, really, watching this magical spectacle play out right in front of our eyes. Like a storybook come to life. And we’re going to learn a little about Taylor’s storytelling in the next segments. 

We cut to Andrea, who tells us that they wanted this to be the biggest thing they’d ever done, but none of it is possible, she says, “without a song, and a person willing to sing it.” We see a hilarious clip of Taylor in the studio with Shellback for reputation, and she’s just being a big nerd, yelling, “I love songs!” and making this kind of pitiful, funny attempt at destruction. She like knocks over a chair, and tosses something on the carpeted floor. She’s just running around with this giddy, childlike excitement, and while this is really funny, it’s also really the catalyst for this whole thing. It is the songs, it is the storytelling, and her love for it. That’s what makes this all possible. 

We hear from Taylor, “storytelling for me is one of the key aspects that makes me feel like life is worth living.” And we’re spliced with clips of her in the studio for debut and fearless songwriting and recording, and she continues, “it’s just that important to me. And crafting a song is just, the happiest I ever am.” We knew this, because we’ve seen clips over the years of her just geeking out with excitement in the writing room. But to hear it from her mouth is really cool. 

We see some clips of recording Speak Now, and the voiceover continues, “if you’re in a writing session with me, like, I’ll go into my lyric space, and just sort of like, just rocking back and forth in a corner muttering.” We see clips of recording Reputation, and she says, “for me, it’s endlessly fascinating. I never get bored of it. Songwriting happens whether I’m on tour or not, because my life has just always been a kind of free-flowing state of you live it, you feel it, you wonder about it, you write about it.” 

If you are a writer of any kind, that quote just hit you hard. “You live it, you feel it, you wonder about it, you write about it.” If you have a similar kind of brain that Taylor does, and like really any writer does, this is how we process emotions. Some people process verbally. Some process through physical mediums, through doing things. But writers process by writing. That’s why we started writing, and that’s why we keep writing. It’s just a daily part of how we deal with everything going on around us, and everything going on inside of us.  

So we’ve just gotten this montage of her writing over the years, and she’s just told us that her process is always ongoing. Live it, feel it, wonder about it, write about it. And that doesn’t start or stop because she’s on tour, because she’s living her life while she’s on tour. It’s a different day to day, but she’s always got these emotions, and her outlet has always been her songwriting, no matter what is going on. 

So we had already gotten the sense that we were heading toward the making of The Life of a Showgirl, since she’s been talking about writing while on tour, and then we finally see it: Taylor in Sweden. And we get a subtitle: The life of a showgirl studio sessions, 2024. “I started going to Sweden in between my shows,” she says, “and it just felt like the most exciting way to make a secret album.” So, let me get this straight, Taylor. You’re performing a 3.5 hour show 3-6 days per week. Then you travel to the next city or the next country. And you’re also the boss of a mega-corportation that bears your name, you’re the leader of this whole team, you’re simultaneously trying to spend time with your loved ones, and rest and recover, and on your offtime you just…fly to Sweden to work more. Whatever non-stop drive she has to create, can I get a little bit of that? How does she do it? 

So we see clips of Taylor, Max Martin, and Shellback in the studio. It’s just the 3 of them working on this album, and these are two producers she hadn’t worked with since reputation. So she’s reuniting with these people who have been important in her career, and they’re kind of giving her notes on her performance. “You can be more violent,” Max says, referring to the way she’s singing these lyrics, and she says, “oh I can be more violent, trust me.” We see this kind of pent up rage within her, which is both funny and relatable. 

She says, “I was in a place in my life where life felt so full of possibility, and it felt like I was figuring things out, it felt like, so romantic, and magical, and passionate, and I wanted to encapsulate that feeling on this album.” I think you accomplished it, Tay. You really did. All of the emotions are there – go back and check out my showgirl playlist, because I’ve gone through every track, and then the themes of the album as a whole, and I think she did capture this mixture of emotions really well. 

“I’ve always felt like they’re my mentors, and I’m their apprentice,” she says of working once again with Max Martin and Shellback, “and they are so brilliant.” And we see clips of them in the studio and this part was really interesting – they’re making sounds with just everyday objects, he’s throwing a pillow on the floor, or he’s drumming on a liquor bottle, or just clapping or stomping on carpet. They’re not just using instruments, which is so cool to see, and now I want to go back to these tracks and pick apart these sounds they’ve created.

But she continues talking about their relationship, “you know they’re your peers but you also look up to them.” So we can see it’s a pretty unique, special relationship she has with them, and she had said about when she first started working with them on Red, it was like going back to school: the school of pop music. So for Showgirl, she’s gone back to school. While also performing on the eras tour and flying back and forth to Sweden. Incredible. 

We can see this is around Christmastime of 2024, they’re drinking spiced wine in the kitchen, and she continues, “I was really ready for that kind of challenge, to go back in with these two people and really try to stretch and challenge myself as much as possible to make, hopefully, the best album that I could possibly make.” Do you remember back in the beginning of the episode, where Andrea was talking about her mom Marjorie always wanting feedback? This is the same thing. Taylor always wants feedback, she always wants to stretch herself and get better and take on new challenges. She wants to grow. And that’s really what the eras are, the impetus for the eras, is this growth and change. That’s how she got here, by always wanting more and wanting to be more. 

We then learn that Taylor immediately sends her new music to her mom, and Andrea jokes that this is amazing but also so scary, she says, “because now I know something that nobody else knows, and that’s a massive responsibility, it’s like, no don’t send it to me. I don’t want it on my phone.” Can you imagine, knowing about new Taylor music before the rest of the world? Coolest thing ever, but also yes, scary as hell. Because of the machine that Taylor Swift Inc and the Swifties are…if that secret got out, terrifying. 

We see Taylor coming up with the line, “but I’m immortal now, baby dolls, I couldn’t if I tried” for the title track, which, great line which really ties everything together in that song. And we hear about her process, she says, “I love it, I love being hyper-detailed, having several overarching themes that are woven throughout.” And this quote really stuck out to me because as I do this work of analyzing Taylor’s lyrics over the past few years, as I pick through these songs and albums and dissect them, you can so clearly see these themes that are running through her songwriting. 

Like for Showgirl, for example, she started talking about the perils of fame and this ugly side of celebrity way back on Red with The Lucky One, then she dove into this theme full-throttle with reputation, she talked about the more depressing side of this in TTPD, and now with Showgirl, she brings it all back together with this theme of like, fame is sometimes terrible, but now I can see what it was all for. So to see her circle around and through these themes is one of the most satisfying parts of her storytelling, because we get to see how her views on these things change over time. That’s her character arc, playing out over songs and albums. 

Then Taylor says, “I think the fans have really gotten into that obsessive nature of my storytelling, too.” Umm, yes we have. In so many ways. But the keyword here is storytelling, and we’re going to dive into this further, why we feel so connected to her and seen by her, with a voiceover from Amos, who tells us, “I think for a lot of people, they feel such a personal connection to her, her deeply personal writing, the drama that she’s been through, the heartbreak and regret that she shared with people. And I think it must be meaningful to her for that to resonate.”  

As Andrea told us earlier, she’s always been about the connection with her fans, and her storytelling is really the medium for this connection. She writes about personal experiences, but through the lens of universal emotion. So suddenly a song about her heartbreak is a song about our heartbreak, and a song about her happiness is a song about our happiness, and that’s really the power of Taylor’s storytelling. It’s personal but universal. And then we get to hear some fans singing the songs that are personal to them, and we get this montage of social media videos of these incredible singers. 

Amos tells us, “one of the things that sets her apart from a lot of other people is how she writes.” Now we go into a montage of the song cardigan, and it’s splices of these different clips of fans singing one after the other, so it’s a cohesive performance of cardigan by all these incredible vocalists. And Amos continues his voiceover, “her writing is personal and it’s vulnerable, and it’s very specific. But in that specificity, people see themselves.” 

“In that specificity, people see themselves.” This might be my favorite quote of the entire episode, because it really lays out why we relate to her stories so much. Taylor can write about these very specific situations, like throwing a keychain on the ground, or about a boyfriend not showing up to your 21st birthday party, or feeling like an old cardigan under someone’s bed.

And though we may never have had keychains tossed at us, we have felt disregarded and minimized by someone who was supposed to love us. We may not have had our boyfriend not show up to our 21st birthday party, but we have felt let down and unimportant. We may not have ever felt exactly like an old cardigan under someone’s bed, but we have felt forgotten by someone who once really valued us. And that’s what Amos means when he says that we see ourselves in her specificity. Because she can take one moment, one emotion, and turn it into something we can all see ourselves in. And that’s the magic of Taylor Swift’s storytelling is this uncanny ability she has to make us feel all the feelings. 

Now we move away from the fan clips, and we move over to Gracie, singing All Too Well in her bedroom in 2020. And we’ve heard what Taylor’s storytelling means to the fans, and the band, and her family, and now we’re zooming over to what it means to Gracie. She says, “I can’t remember a time existing without her music. Every chapter of my life was marked by an album of hers that came out around the same time.” And Gracie touches on the other aspect of Taylor’s storytelling, which is that it grows alongside us, and it marks our growth. It’s never just been one story that she’s telling, it’s this ever-evolving story that kind of narrates our life as we’re living it.  

And now Gracie and Taylor are together, and they’re going to practice their duet backstage in Toronto. Taylor is still sick, but she’s powering through. Gracie comments on the way “us” and “out of the woods” fit together is just incredible, and Taylor says, “the double bridge is gonna send me off a cliff.” Us too, Taylor, us too. So they’re practicing, and we get a voiceover from Gracie, “How is it that we’re singing this song? For me this is like a dream.”

Then we cut to Gracie on the lift, about to go out on the eras tour stage. And it is a dream, like this can’t be real life, to sing with Taylor Swift in the greatest show on earth. So they’re performing Us and Out of the Woods, and when Taylor hits the verse that reveals what this mashup is, she goes into out of the woods, Gracie just loses it, and she’s so excited, she starts bowing down to Taylor. It’s a very sweet moment. 

We’re seeing some fan reactions not just to this Gracie duet, but to different parts of the show. And we go back to Andrea, who says, “I look forward to seeing the different ways that the fans react from night to night. You see the tears and you see the hugging each other, and it just, I love it. For me personally, watching the show, that moment that Taylor appears, and there she is, that to me is absolutely worth everything.”

And what Andrea is talking about here isn’t just seeing her daughter on stage, it’s seeing the fans reactions to her daughter on stage. Because that moment when Taylor pops out from under the huge wings, that moment is where as a fan, your dreams just came true. And Andrea, at every show, she’s watching our reactions to this, and that’s what makes it worth it. She continues, “It makes me feel like this was my calling in life. Whether it was Taylor or my mom, it was to be around someone who loves entertaining and is extraordinarily talented. It was just, like ditto. It just happened all over again.” 

She’s circling back to the Marjorie of it all, which is of course our episode title, so it’s important what we’re about to get into, and we’re about to hear a little bit about what it was like to write and perform Marjorie on the eras tour, both for Taylor, and for her family to hear this and watch this really powerful performance. 

We’re seeing home movies of Taylor with her grandmother, and in a voiceover, Taylor says, “she died when I was 13, when I was on a  trip to Nashville to try and make it. So I’ve always just sort of felt like she was just seeing this, you know. One of the things that still rips me apart when I listen to it is that she’s singing with me on this song.” And Taylor had revealed this before, that her grandmother’s vocals were featured in the background on this track. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were singing to me now,” and then you hear Marjorie. 

And Taylor says, “it’s things like that that just make you feel like your whole heart is in this whole thing.” But what she’s getting at here with her whole heart words is the sacrifice. Her grandmother died while she was away, and I’m assuming her mom was away with her, so they didn’t get to say goodbye. Because they chose to go and pursue this dream for Taylor. So that’s a heavy loss, made even heavier by this guilt that choosing this career meant letting your family down. So I think this is part of why she performs Marjorie on the tour, because it’s her way of kind of showing her grandmother, like I’m sorry I wasn’t there, but look where I am now. And look where you are now, you’re performing for millions of people all over the world with me. 

And it seems the fans really got this message, because we started honoring Marjorie right along with Taylor. Andrea tells us they didn’t even have lights prepared for that song, but the fans brought them. We turned on our phone flashlights. And Andrea says “it just became a very loving tribute to her grandmother.” But now we learn that it’s not only a tribute to Marjorie, it’s really become a moment to grieve and remember, even for the band and the crew. And we zoom over to Kamilah, one of the background vocalists, who says, “Marjorie is about Taylor’s grandmother, but it’s personal to me, and I think that’s a testament to Taylor’s writing because it really feels like it’s your own experience.” 

And Kamilah is about to tell us more, but what she’s getting at here is what this whole episode has been circling around, which is this way that Taylor tells stories about her own life and we apply them to our lives. That’s the thread that tethers us to her. And Kamilah continues, “I’ve been performing with Taylor for 12 years, and truly the eras tour was a surprise to all of us. I lost my mother September of 2021, so when rehearsals started, not only did I need music and need to be with my band family, I needed to heal. Music is the thing that is most healing to me.” And while she’s saying this we’re seeing clips of her and the band together backstage, just being this lovely, cohesive family that they are and having fun together. And now we cut over to one of the Toronto huddles, and Kamilah is leading the huddle on this night. 

“I, for the past few years,” she begins, “have been really learning to accept and lean into that two different things can be true at one time. And last year, that really smacked me in the face, because we stared this tour and we were all making memories and falling in love with each other, and i was the happiest I had been in some time. And at the same time, I was heartbroken every moment because my mother wasn’t here to experience this joy, and to see The Eras Tour.” She’s holding back tears now, and everyone is trying not to cry. 

“Like, if you saw me sobbing somewhere, you’d never know that I was the happiest I had been in a while. And if you saw my joy, it was often that I was pretty devastated. And so, knowing that, I just want to, I don’t know, give permission to feel both.” Taylor is crying now. They’re all letting the tears flow. She continues, “To be here, feel what we feel, be as present as you can in these next four shows, thank you to all of you, let’s go f*** this shit up.” 

Whew. She just said so much, so let’s unpack this a bit. The first thing she’s getting at is this guilt that comes with grief. Because if you’ve lost someone you love, you almost feel guilty for ever feeling joy again. Because you know that joy, they don’t get to feel that. The second thing is accepting that you can feel both. You can feel the grief that they’re gone, and you can continue to look for joy and experience joy in your life, and both of those things can be in your body at the same time. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive. 

But the final thing she’s getting at really ties back to Taylor’s storytelling, and when she says “give permission to feel both,” that’s what the eras tour did. It was this collective emotional release, where we could feel the joy of the tour, we could feel the grief within the songs and within our own stories, and both of those things – joy and grief – can exist during this 3.5 hour period without any questioning or feeling guilty or being in conflict within yourself.

Because there’s so much joy in this performance, and there’s so much grief that’s encapsulated in these songs and in our own stories. And having this place where we can meet in the middle, and have permission to feel both things, that’s the beauty of it. It’s a place where everything can exist exactly how it is, and not many places or spaces or time periods in the world exist where we can just be. So Kamilah’s words have gotten them highly emotional, just like they made all of us watching at home highly emotional, and they get into their huddle cheer, and they’re joking that now they have to go back into makeup for touch ups because of the tears. 

Now Taylor is on stage on the last night in Toronto, and she’s permorning, of course, Marjorie. And we get these beautiful wide shots of the crowd in the dark, and slowly all of these lights pop up, twinkling all over, and each one of those is a phone flashlight turned on for Marjorie. But it’s a light turned on for anyone you’re grieving, and anything you’re grieving. I got chills watching this part, when Taylor sings the lyric, “watched as you signed your name, Marjorie,” we see a shot of Andrea in the crowd doing the hand gesture, signing her mom’s name in the air, and then we zoom over to Taylor doing the same thing.

So it’s this wonderful family tribute, and the next line of the song is, “all your closets of backlogged dreams, and how you left them all to me.” And here Taylor is, a backlog of generational dreams all checked off. She’s now living the dream, and we hear Marjorie’s voice, and it’s this beautiful, beautiful, cathartic moment. And we get a shot of Kamilah singing during the lyric, “you’re alive you’re alive in my head,” and after she says that line, she looks up at the sky to her mom, with tears welling in her eyes. 

We get a voiceover from Andrea, who says, “My mom’s voice in that song. And she would have loved to have seen all of this, and she’d be so proud, and I think she’d also be really really stoked that she’s now singing in the stadium every night.” The song is ending, and Taylor is walking down the stage back to the piano, and the backup singers file in line behind her as she passes them. And as she passes Kamilah, they exchange this glance, like “whew, that was heavy, but it was amazing.” There’s so much in this single look and sigh between them.

Taylor is now addressing the crowd, and I think we’re after the champagne problems standing ovation which generally lasts several minutes, and she says, “Toronto, we’re at the end of this tour, so you doing that, you have no idea how much it means to me and to…” And her voice breaks. She sobs. We have very rarely seen Taylor break. But she does here, and it seems like it’s finally hitting her: this is almost over.

But she pulls it together and she continues, “and to my band and to my crew and everybody who’s put so much of this, into this tour, into their…I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. I’m just having a bit of a moment, sorry.” She cries again, and then she jokes, “it’s not even the last show. I love you guys, thank you so much for that.” And the crowd just roars louder than ever before, and this is a moment where we were projecting – or trying to project – just how much this tour meant to us. We can’t convey it in just cheers, but it’s all we had, and to see how emotional it made Taylor, it made us even more emotional because it meant just as much to us as it did to her. 

She exits the stage for the last time in Toronto, and now we see her in the car with her brother Austin, and they’re sort of debriefing on the show. Taylor says, “I got emotional, I felt like a dumbass.” 

Austin says, “that was the best part.” And Austin is right, because we got to see this real moment of vulnerability from Taylor. That was the most connected to her that maybe we had ever felt, because it wasn’t rehearsed and there were no 20 different backup plans. It was a real moment of connection and emotion. 

“I couldn’t put words together, Austin,” she says, “that was kind of embarrassing. That’s nice of you to say though, you’re a very supportive person.” 

He repeats, “that was the best part of the whole thing.” And this is where we can see what standards she holds herself to. Everything has to be perfect. But what she can’t see in the moment is that we needed that, and maybe she needed that. It was giving us permission to feel the grief that the tour was coming to an end. 

She tells Austin about Kamila’s speech before the show in the huddle, and she says that’s what really got to her, and stayed with her throughout the show. “We always made eye contact during Marjorie because of her mom,” like that moment walking across the stage that we got to see in that clip, “but it put it in perspective like, I don’t know, like the fact that mom did get to see it, and like Travis to go see it, and dad got to see it, and I just felt so lucky, and that’s what it like cracked me. It cracked me wide open.”

She was upset not just because of Kamilah, and Marjorie, and the end of the tour, but she was crying because of how lucky and blessed she feels. And going back to what Kamilah said, permission to feel both things at the same time, that’s exactly what she gave Taylor permission to do. She can be grieving the loss of loved ones, and the end of the tour, but she can also feel this joy and appreciation. So it’s this very cool full circle moment that we get to see play out in real time. 

We see a phone call while Taylor’s in the car and her parents are on the phone, and Anrdrea says, “it’s going to be an emotional time, from here on out, through to the end.” And, oh boy, Andrea, you are 100% correct, because we are heading into both the final episode of the doc, and the final three shows of the eras tour. The emotions are getting intense. Really intense. 

Taylor says, “I’m just so happy that all of this has happened, and we all got to experience it together. We love you.” So the very last line has circled back around to this family theme, the Marjorie of it all, and the Swift of it all. We really learned in this episode what a family business this is. We got the sense of that before, that Taylor’s family all worked with her in some capacity, but this episode is really the clearest look we’ve ever gotten into the Swifts, and it’s a really beautiful way to tie this whole narrative of Taylor’s story together.  

Outro & What’s Next

And that’s where we leave off the second to last episode, and as we head into episode 6, grab your tissues, because the screen is about to get blurry for all of us. 

In my next episode we’re recapping episode 6, in which your girl makes a special appearance, and I can’t wait to tell you all about it, and go through and relive this final episode with you. 

Quick plea before I sign off: I’m just starting this channel, I put so much work into it and I love it, and if you do too, please subscribe wherever you’re seeing or hearing this, and send it to your friends, because I don’t know what I’m doing with the algorithms and I’d really like to be able to reach more of you, but the internets has to show it to you first. And it can’t do that unless I get more engagement. Thank you so much – I appreciate all of you who listen, and like, and subscribe, and leave a comment or a review – it means so much to me, and I’ll see you in the next episode.