The End of an Era Episodes 1 & 2 Recap: Magic & Madness
Podcast Episode: December 17, 2025
Episode Description
Taylor Swift’s The End of an Era isn’t just documenting a tour – it’s continuing a story she’s been telling about herself for years.
In this episode of the Swiftly Sung Stories Podcast, we look at Episodes 1 and 2 of the docuseries not as just a recap, but as a chapter in Taylor’s larger self-narrated career arc.
Through a storytelling lens, we unpack the moments that reveal Taylor’s creative process, the emotional weight of sustaining a career at this scale, and the persona she steps into in order to survive it. From rehearsals and reflection to vulnerability and performance, these episodes show both the magic of the show, and the large shadow it casts.
Seen this way, The End of an Era isn’t about endings at all. It’s about identity, authorship, and what it means to live inside a story you’re still writing. This episode explores how these first two chapters deepen our understanding of Taylor’s relationship to fame, ambition, and selfhood, and why they matter in the context of her entire body of work.
Listen to the Episode
Episode Transcript
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Swiftly Sung Stories Podcast, I’m Jen your Swiftie English Teacher, and today, we have some brand new Taylor content to talk about!
The End of an Era docuseries episodes 1 and 2 are out on Disney Plus, and today I want to recap those episodes for you and discuss what I see as the most important parts of Taylor’s story that she’s narrating for us in this docuseries.
Every piece of content that Taylor creates is telling a story, whether it’s an album, or a documentary, or a prologue, or a music video – they each tell their own stories, and they also add to the larger story that she’s been telling about herself for a long time. In my last episode, I talked about the themes of The Life of a Showgirl and the story she’s telling in that album, and today I want to do the same thing with The End of an Era.
So what’s the story that she’s telling us in this doc? Because it’s not just behind the scenes of the eras tour – it’s so much more, and we get so much new information here about her process, and her values, and her worldview, and I think it fills in a lot of blanks for these last few eras and answers some of these long-running questions we’ve had about her career and her life.
I had planned to make a prediction episode about what the future holds for TS 13 and for Taylor’s career, but I’m going to hold off on that, because I want to wait and see if she gives us any clues in the docuseries about the larger story she’s telling.
So let’s roll the intro and get right into episode 1.
Intro & Announcement
Just a quick little announcement for you guys, about 6 months ago, I was contacted by a documentarian to license one of my Tiktoks, and that video was my thoughts on the end of the eras tour, and the collective grief that we were all feeling, and how special and unique this cultural moment of the eras tour was. I’ll link it in the shownotes, and please give me a follow on Tiktok when you head over there.
It wasn’t a viral video by far, so I was a little suspicious when I was contacted by this person, because the contents of this tiktok video was a bit specific, right? She said it was for a documentary about concert tours and what they mean in our larger cultural landscape. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but a mental note was made. This was before the end of an era series was even announced. I was kind of excited, but I didn’t want to freak out and tell the world.
But then, as I’m finishing episode 1 yesterday, I see this documentarian’s name as the credits are rolling. It’s a very unique name. And that’s when I freaked out. I did agree to licence this clip and they did pay me for it. But just because they did that doesn’t mean it’s going to end up in the final edit. But they are using other creator’s videos in the episodes to tell this story…so I guess it’s a possibility?
But anyway, I might be in the doc, so keep an eye out, I’m wearing a red and white striped shirt in the tiktok. I think if they do use it it will probably be in the later episodes 5 and 6 just because it’s about the end of the eras tour, so narratively it makes sense it would come toward the conclusion. So I’m excited, I wanted to share, but I also don’t want to count my eggs before they’ve hatched.
So today I’m going to recap episodes 1 and 2 today in the context of the larger story Taylor has been telling us all along. Next week will be episodes 3 and 4, then episodes 5 and 6 come on boxing day and I’ll try to get those out after Christmas when I can, then I’m taking a break because it’s been a long few months of starting this channel and making a huge amount of content. But I’ll be back later in January, and we’ll pick up with predictions for TS13 and where Taylor could be going next.
Episode 1 Recap: “Welcome to The Eras Tour”
Okay, let’s start with episode 1 of the end of an era.
We open the episode with an overhead shot of Vancouver, BC, and BC place, where the final eras tour performance took place on December 8, 2024. It says, “the last show of the eras tour, 15 minutes until showtime, the final huddle begins”.
Then we’re backstage, and we see Taylor, arms around her dancers, and she’s giving this final speech before they’re about to take the stage for the last time. She’s giving this really meaningful monologue about how much hard work this has taken, but it’s the way in which she says this that’s really incredible to me, because it just shows how your mind works.
She says, “I think about every single one of you as little kids. I think about the moment you decided dancing was your calling, and the moment you first saw a band and thought, ‘man I want to save up for an instrument.’ Every single one of us has picked professions that, categorically, people for the majority of the time, they tell you you shouldn’t do it. They tell you you should not try to do this. You have to love the thing so much that you override 85-95% of the advice you are given along the way, by oftentimes people that you respect, people you trust, people in the field. Everyone in dance, everyone in music will tell anyone younger if there’s anything else you can do, do that. And so I’ll see you getting rejected, not getting the job, not getting the part, not getting the solo, I’ll see all of those things that happened all along the way. The doors that were shut, the doors that were open, the windows you pried open.”
It’s at this point that she tears up and her voice breaks, but she continues, “and sometimes, I’ll see you when you’re older, and I’ll think about what you’re going to tell your family or the people that you mentor, because every single person in here has the spirit to mentor others, and to tell them, ‘yes, do it, try it, go for it, if you have that same love for it.’ And I think about whether that’s to your grandchildren, or to the little neighborhood kid who just wants to talk about what that was like.”
So she’s seeing this whole confluence of events in her mind’s eye, right? She’s imagining all of the things that it took for these people to get to this place, and for her to get to his place as their ringleader. She’s telling a story about their story. And she goes on, “Everyone likes to talk about phenomena like The Eras Tour almost as if it were pieces falling into place in some sort of accidental confluence of events that just happened, right? When I’m thinking about the people that are in this circle, I don’t think about it as pieces that fell into place, I think of each of you as, like, tectonic plates on the earth that took millions of micro decisions and forces of you pushing and pushing inch by inch closer together, and The Eras Tour wasn’t when all the pieces fell into place. That was just when every single one of us had done so much work to where this tour was just when we all clicked together.”
“It is our job to make this look accidental, and it is our job to make this look effortless, but I just want every single one of you to know that I, in no way, shape, or form, look at this as the pieces falling into place. You put the pieces where they are. This is the biggest challenge any of us had ever done. Tonight we complete that challenge.”
While all of this is happening, we’re seeing both Taylor giving this emotional speech, and then footage of her on her way to the stage, from the car to the cleaning cart to the understage to the platform. So it’s building emotion, it’s building tension, right? And if you’re like me, you teared up in the first 3 minutes.
But this speech – I think this gives us the most amount of insight in this episode about Taylor as a storyteller. Because she’s not just saying, “I see you and I appreciate all your hard work. I couldn’t do this without you.” It’s so much more than that, and it’s so much more than that because she’s telling a story. And she is damn good at telling stories, and telling stories that resonate and tug at our hearts and punch us in the gut. But above all, her stories connect. They foster connection. And it’s here in this moment where she’s fostering connection with her teammates that we can see how her mind works. She’s not only focused on the here and now – she’s zoomed out, and looked at all of the pieces of all of the lives and all of the decisions that it took working out in just the right way so that they all reached this place.
We always kind of knew that her mind worked this way, because she does this in her storytelling all the time, right? This zooming in and out and looking at both the large and small, and her mind works in this natural narrative way, but to see it in this context, when it’s not in songwriting but looking at the larger picture, is a really cool moment to see. It’s like a movie reel playing in her mind, and she sees all of her dancers and band as children, and how they had to do all of the hard work, and not listen to the naysayers, and push through to get to where they are today.
They all beat incredible odds to get to this place where they are the exception, not the rule. And when she’s speaking about all of them, and thinking about all of their stories, she’s also telling her own story, and it’s the story she’s been telling us all along: I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try. She’s been on this journey filled with pitfalls and trials and tribulations, and the story that she tells us – that she’s always told us – is that she gets through those things by working her ass off, and with a lot of creativity and a lot of help from her team.
But what I like most about this speech is that we can clearly see that she not only thinks and speaks in these narratives, she thinks in metaphors. And she takes one metaphor – pieces falling into place – and uses that to make a leap into another metaphor, tectonic plates. They’re both jigsaw-like metaphors, right? But one is miraculous, it just happened, and one is the opposite, it’s full of time and pressure. She compares this team to tectonic plates, all rubbing up against one another, with all of this pressure of the industry and expectations and being the mirrorball spinning on their tallest tiptoes to entertain, and instead of breaking, instead of shattering on the floor and scattering, they sync up. All this pressure has pushed them into the exact right configuration to be together, and there’s a lot of pressure in this environment, but it’s not an earthquake that ruptures. It just kind of rumbles beneath the surface with excitement and energy and connection. She’s just used these incredibly emotional metaphors in a speech to her team, like who does that? Of course she does. Of course Taylor Swift does.
So we see this incredibly emotional moment, and then she gets on her platform and goes out to perform one last time in this career-defining moment in time. And we get our title card: “The end of an era, episode one, welcome to the eras tour.”
Now that she’s shown us how it ended, we’re going to go back to how it began. And we hear about how she came up with the idea for The Eras Tour. She says she came up with the idea two years before, and she came up with this idea because of two very unpleasant factors: the masters heist, and the pandemic.
And she says of the sale of her masters, “I decided to sort of defiantly re-record all of my music.” And in doing that, she revisited her old stories, her old lives. In going back through her first six albums, she said it was like reading her old diaries, and she says, “all this work is so indicative of the time I was in in my life, thinking about all the different girls I was until I was this one.” And this is, what she says, plants the seed of the eras tour: “the idea of celebrating your past.“
But I think it’s important to note that this is kind of a new mindset for Taylor. She hasn’t been so celebratory of her past in the eras leading up to this. We’ve just gone through folklore, evermore and Midnights, which are not really albums that celebrate your past. Check out the video right before this one, my dissection of the themes of the life of a showgirl, if you want a deep dive on where she was during this time, because she wasn’t super optimistic.
And then she really clues us into her new mindset with what she says next: “We think these bad things are happening to me, or to us. If you flip it around correctly and you react in a certain way, those things can be happening for you.” So she has a new mindset, and remember that she’s recording this particular interview, probably, after the eras tour is over. So she’s looking back over the past and reinterpreting these events that are happening to her as things that, in the long run, are happening for her. They’re opportunities, not pitfalls. And this is a major theme on Showgirl, which hopefully we get to see a bit of the making of showgirl in future episodes, which is this new mindset she has. The sky is now opalite, and it’s opalite because she changed her tune. She changed her mindset.
And the seeds of this new mindset are planted when she’s thinking about the eras tour, about a tour that celebrates her past, even when she doesn’t own all of her past. This is growth. This is change. And in an incredibly difficult time in her career, she’s still choosing to celebrate everything that came before.
So she says of creating the tour that she thought of “chapters, divided up by albums, and everything changes when the chapter changes.” And this isn’t only a great description of the eras tour sets and setlist, but it’s also a great metaphor for life. When chapters change in our life, when we move from one season to the next, everything does change, because we change.
So during this voiceover we’re seeing mockups of the eras tour stage and sets, and I wanted to point out that in these renderings, they’ve labeled them “sparkle stadium,” which isn’t a stadium that exists, it’s just a fake name in case any of these renderings leaked. Just a cute, funny note.
Then she goes into explaining how this all came together, and it took a village. And we get a scene of her coming into rehearsal to meet the dancers for the first time, and she’s in tears of joy. She shakes everyone’s hand and introduces herself to everyone, each time saying, “hi, I’m Taylor.” Which is just incredible that she doesn’t assume that everyone knows who she is, and I think this speaks to ego, right? Of course everyone in the room knows who you are, not just because you’re Taylor Swift, the most famous person on the planet, but because you’re their boss. Even if you’ve never met your boss or your boss’ boss, you know their name. But she’s in tears of joy and excitement, and to see the dancers’ reactions to meeting her is incredibly sweet.
So the team is in rehearsals, and then we get a montage of how this all came together. We see dance practice, and choreography prep, and then we kind of fast forward through the months leading up to the show and how large this became almost immediately. We get some sweet fan videos of scoring tickets, we see the ticketmaster crash, and all then we get to opening night. And this is kind of a montage of the popularity and power of The Eras Tour. Glendale renames itself Swift City for opening night, we see the Seattle earthquake (shoutout to my hometown), we see the Swiftnomics of it all and the incredible amount of business Taylor brought into each tour stop, taylor-gating (which someone says is “like Woodstock without the drugs,” but I like to think of it as a Grateful Dead show, also without the drugs), and we’re seeing not just how the tour affected physical places, but how it affected us emotionally. Andrea says “it became this movement,” and Taylor says, “it’s like a force to be reckoned with in global culture,” and it really was. Whether you got to go or not, you felt that if you’re a Swiftie. It was something that brought us together at a time where the world had never been more uncertain, and more scary, and more overwhelming. We could count on that livestream, or that date that we had tickets for, and we had something to look forward to.
But then we take a bit of a darker turn, and we zoom in on Vienna, Austria, August 8, 2024. Those 3 shows were, of course, cancelled after a terrorist plot was discovered, and we get some news clips describing this horrific situation, but thankfully a situation that was disarmed before anyone was hurt.
We see Taylor after this, in her hotel in London gearing up for the last shows of the european leg, and she says, “we’ve done like 128 shows so far, but this is the first one where I feel like I’m skating on thin ice or something.” You can tell she’s not in a great frame of mind and she’s going through it.
She goes on, “we’ve had a series of very violent, scary things happen to the tour. We dodged, like a massacre situation.” You can tell how freaked out she is by all of this, as anyone would be, but I can’t really imagine the weight of this situation as the person whose name is on the letterhead, you know? It’s such a huge responsibility, and that much visibility makes you a target, and unfortunately, makes your fans a target.
And then we get really heavy. “There was this horrible attack in Liverpool,” she goes on, “at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. And it was little kids that…” And here, her voice breaks, and she starts crying, and the rest of the world watching did too. She whispers, “I have a hard time explaining it,” and they insert a news clip recalling this horrific incident.
She’s speaking about the attack on children in Southport, Merseyside, here in England in which three young girls were killed and many more were injured. I can’t speak about this too much without breaking, but I do want to say that we remember Alice, Bebe, and Elsie, and to their families we send all of our love, and this community of Swifties is here for you, just like your amazing community has rallied around you.
We see Taylor in tears, and she says, “I’m going to meet some of these families tonight, and put on a pop concert, you know?” And it’s at this point where I’m struck by just how odd her life must be, and I’m also struck by how different these two selves have to be: Taylor Swift human, who cries and worries and has the world on her shoulders, and Taylor Swift pop star, who has to entertain and put on a happy face and put all those human worries and needs and desires aside when she puts on this persona.
I talked a lot about this dual self in my last video talking about the themes of Showgirl, but this is just the ultimate display of these two selves at this moment. Human Taylor wants to break down and lose it, and grieve, and support these families, and probably blames herself for so much. But pop star Taylor has 90,000 people coming to her show tonight, and she can’t let them down.
She’s really emotional and tearful, describing these really hard parts of her life and her career, and she goes on, “It’s gonna be fine, because when I meet them, I’m not gonna do this, I swear to god. I’m not gonna do this. I’m gonna be smiling. So any of this gets out of the way before you ever go on stage. You lock it off. Three and a half hours, they don’t have to worry about you.” She has to put human Taylor aside and put on the pop star persona. Then when those 3.5 hours are over, she can fall apart again. This is the life of a showgirl. Spinning on her tallest tiptoes, and when she breaks it’s in a million pieces.
It’s now 10 hours to showtime at Wembley, and we see some of the backstage and costume goings on, and then we get into a little bit about how the goal of this entire production is really to provide escapism. We hear from Amos, Taylor’s bass player, who tells us that “the only thing that we’re trying to do is to make the world go away for a little while and make people feel seen and let them scream lyrics that they love at the top of their lungs.”
And I think this is a beautiful and ironic juxtaposition – all of this work, all of this money, all of these logistics that exist in the real world done by real people – it’s all with the goal of making all that stuff go away. It’s an elaborate magic act, right? Like she says in mirrorball, “I’ll show you every version of yourself tonight.” It’s all a ploy to make us forget about our real lives, and to get to live in this fantasy world where we’re entertained so elaborately and precisely that we get to forget all of those everyday struggles.
We get to be different versions of ourselves as we consume this show, and we get to forget about the versions of ourselves that have to pay bills and take the kids to school and nurse their dying parents and fight with their boss – we get to live in an alternate reality, and that’s the goal. So when Taylor says she wanted to overdeliver, this is what she’s talking about: she wanted to make it so all-consuming, and so enchanting, that we forget ourselves. It’s escapism, and it’s escapism at a time when people need it most in this crazy time to be alive.
Now we’re in the car that’s taking Taylor to Wembley, we see her driving through London, and she’s practicing everything has changed to perform with Ed Sheeran that night, and then we get this very sweet phone call with Travis. And this, in any other world, is just a regular partner phone call, right? It’s like me calling my husband to check in and talk about our days and what time we’re gonna be home. But these are not everyday people, these are not everyday things they’re talking about, and I don’t think Taylor has ever, ever been this candid about a relationship. She’s certainly never let us hear phone calls between herself and a partner. So it’s very candid and very vulnerable, and I think that tells us all we need to know about this love. The coolest part of this phone call to me is when she says, “some people get a vitamin drip, I got this conversation.” And what this says to me is that this relationship feeds her. And he says, “thank you for making my life better.” That’s food. That’s sustenance. You finally left the table, and what a simple thought, you’re starving til you’re not. She’d fed. She’s finally fed.
We get another time marker: it’s 6 hours to showtime at Wembley. And we’re back to Amos, who tells us that he started working with her in 2007. That’s 18 years touring together, which is incredible. And he tells us that although a lot has changed, “the thing that remains really constant is there’s not a challenge that she isn’t going to meet head on and decide to conquer.” And that tenacity is a big part of why we all love her, right? She’s faced with an obstacle, and she pivots, and she finds a way around, and pretty soon, she’s on the other side of the mountain.
This footage is spliced with a clip of what Amos calls “casting the vision” for the show, and it’s this incredible clip of Taylor basically laying out her brainchild of how the show is going to go, including these epic moments of air guitar and air drums, and what songs are going to be included, and you can see how visually this all in her head already – she knows exactly what she wants it to be. I think this shows her ability to translate these visions and dreams in her mind’s eye and cast them into reality, and really what that is – that knowing, and describing, and creating – that’s storytelling. So it’s again this incredible peek at how the wheels churn for her and how everything is a story she wants to tell, and she has all of these tools at her disposal for how to tell these stories to her audience. She can tell them with music, with beats, with lighting, with movement, with words – and she has combined all of these into a 3.5 hour set that tells a complete story, the story of her career from beginning to end. And it’s beautiful, I wish we all had that ability to translate our ideas and manifest them into reality.
So we continue counting down. 4 hours until showtime. We get these really sweet clips of fans outside Wembley, who have been waiting for hours, and I do remember that London was tense in these few days leading up to the shows. Wembley were the first shows back after the foiled terrorist plot in Austria, and the messaging here from the Mayor was, basically, we are tightening security everywhere. I saw more police out and about in London in those few days than I’ve ever seen before. But the energy was also just pure excitement.
So we’re now inside the stadium, and we meet Taylor backstage in her dressing room, laying down on her sofa, and she puts on an audiobook just trying to calm her nerves. That audiobook, by the way, is The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, and it’s a great read, and it’s very much the vibe of audiobooks that Taylor described in her Colbert interview, except it’s not an English manor covered in Ivy, it takes place in the Adirondacks with a wealthy family in a palatial estate, and there’s a big mystery that unfolds shrouded in secrecy in the woods. Definitely read it or listen to it.
Then we hear from Taylor in a voiceover, and she’s describing this tense moment going back out on stage for the first time since Vienna. “I want to keep all of the nerves I have away from the crowd,” she says, “because when you’re sort of the ringleader of this show, they can sense any kind of shift energetically in you, and you have to really focus on that and factor that in, that ‘you’re at The Eras Tour, nothing’s wrong.” This is, again, the life of a Showgirl, and as she says in the prologue poem for the album, “you will cover the wound, no matter how deep it is.” You have to make it look planned, and you have to make it look effortless, and you have to land the plane without letting them see you sweat.
Then we see Ed come in to prep for the show, and they’re having a catch up, and she’s describing all of these intense feelings of being hunted lately. Ed says, “I feel like people have forgotten that you’re a human being amongst all of this,” and he’s gesturing to the wider production of the show. Taylor agrees, 100%. Taylor Swift Inc is so much larger than Taylor Swift, human girl. And this whole scene is really describing these two selves that The Life of a Showgirl goes so deeply into: the showgirl versus the girl, and what happens to the girl when the show takes over, and she’s no longer human.
And then we get a very heavy and sad reminder of how these two selves affect one another, and how these two selves are at war. We get a paragraph on a black screen that says, “before each of the five Wembley shows, Taylor meets privately with the survivors and families of the victims of the tragic attack in Southport.” She and her mom come out of that room both in full tears, and the atmosphere is very heavy. Back in her dressing room, Taylor’s mom says, “I know you helped them. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I know you helped them.” Taylor is in full costume and makeup, crying on the couch, and we know that she has to pick herself up and get out on stage soon.
We get a voiceover from Taylor, and she says, “I just do live in a reality that’s very unreal a lot of the time. But it’s my job to be able to kind of handle all these feelings, and then perk up immediately to perform. That’s just the way it’s got to be.”
That’s her job, to entertain. And no one will be entertained if you can’t make it through the setlist. And while I think we can’t really compare our struggles to Taylor’s struggles, we have very different means to deal with our problems, and the scale of our problems are very different, I think this is one thing that money can’t buy. And while Taylor gets a lot of flack for being out of touch or complaining about her situation or just being a billionaire in her castle, this issue she’s describing here can’t be solved with money or success or notoriety. Money can’t buy that kind of strength and that kind of compartmentalization that it takes to meet with the families of murder victims, whose murders you probably feel partially responsible for but you’re not, try to comfort them and relate to them and reassure them, and have all of that heaviness and all of that weight on your shoulders, and then moments later forget all of that and go out on stage and entertain 90k people.
Though that’s not a normal person problem, that’s not a normal person life, that’s also not a normal amount of strength and resilience and tenacity. That is a remarkable amount of strength and composure. And while I think this life has tried to tear her down, and many people have tried to make her feel small and not good enough and not worthy, I do believe that all of these trials have built her into this person who can do it, and can make it look effortless while she’s doing it.
And I think part of what this docuseries is showing us is behind that curtain, what’s really going on behind the scenes. And not in a look-how-amazing-I-am sort of way, but in a way that builds connection. Because that’s always been the goal of her stories, to build connection, no matter if she’s singing us a song or writing us a poem or Miss Americana or showing us these 6 episodes of behind the scenes. She’s saying yes, I have an abnormal life, but I am not inhuman. I am very human, and these things – all these things you say about me and all these things you sling at me – they affect me. And I think this series is showing us this incredibly effectively.
Next we get a bit of a mood lightener as we move toward showtime, and we get – finally for the first time – footage of her riding inside the cleaning cart. We always kind of wondered what it was like in there and we’d seen photos, but to see it actually moving with her inside, being swept (pun intended) to the stage, it’s pretty cool. We see her under the stage, we see the LED screen countdown, and the crowd at Wembley is pumped, and then we finally see her appear. And through this montage of that first night back at Wembley, we get a voiceover, and she talks about locking eyes with the crowd,
“I see the mass quantities of joy that everyone’s feeling. What’s interesting is like, there’s some joy in the show, but there’s a lot of emotions that aren’t just like, ‘put on your smiley face and come to the Eras Tour. It’s so much more.” And this is a really interesting point – it’s not a totally happy show. And looking at the setlist, I would say maybe 30% max are happy songs, because most of her catalogue isn’t happy songs, right? So what is it that translates into joy in the crowd? When she’s singing about really heavy stuff, and emotional stuff? She explains her theory on that next, and it’s a good one.
“You look out into the crowd, and it isn’t just like a blob of lights. These are millions of stories and all these counter-narratives all colliding in one place, where we feel safe to be demonstrative of a whole spectrum of emotion. That stuff is really powerful. Life contains multitudes and we’re kind of exploring all of the dramatic edges of those things. That’s what might be unlocking feelings of joy, feelings of euphoria, and it still gets me. It does.”
So her theory on why The Eras Tour brought so much joy to so many was that it allowed a space for us to feel our feelings, no matter what those feelings are. And it’s that release, where you have the freedom to be sad, to be happy, to be angry, and to have all of those feelings, even if they’re contradictory, validated in song and in your cohorts in the crowd and in the energy in the room, that’s the magic of The Eras Tour.
But one piece that I want to add is that if you’re a longtime Swiftie like me, you’ve grown up alongside these stories. Taylor’s stories have become your stories, and Taylor’s eras coincide with your eras, and you have emotional ties to each one of these songs. So going into that stadium, especially after she hadn’t toured for what I consider to be her most powerful and vulnerable albums, all of that energy was built up and needed to be released.
And what she says about all of these millions of stories and counter-narratives, each one of those are stories in their own right, in their own lives, but they are also tied to the story of Taylor Swift, because she’s been narrating our lives as we’ve been living them. And to then finally hear those songs live, directly from the person who wrote them, that’s like having an audiobook of your life narrated before your eyes. It’s doing what stories are supposed to do, which is to foster connection, not just with her audience, but with one another and with ourselves.
So that’s the alchemy of The Eras Tour, and why it was so magical, and why it felt so joyful – because we were all allowing ourselves to revisit our past lives together, grieving them, and then releasing those past selves together. And Taylor was essentially modeling this for us, right? By revisiting her eras, and role playing these past versions of herself, remembering both the bad and the good, we could look back at our past eras in the same way. It allows us a framework for processing our inner lives, and writing our own stories, and then letting those stories go. And I think the joy in the eras tour is this collective release. This mass letting go and shedding our skins, in a safe place.
And one more thought on this then we’ll wrap up episode 1, I think this is the same reason why events like Southport and why Vienna felt so terrifying. Because the Taylor Swift universe has always been our safe space, and should be a safe space, and there are people who tried to take that away.
So we’re at the end of the show, and we get a clip of her overcome with emotion on stage, and then taking her final bow. And one of the first things she asks her tour manager is, “did anything bad happen that I need to know about?” So even though she’s back, and she’s just had this cathartic 3.5 hour show, she’s immediately worried about the wider world that she lives in and that her fans live in.
We see her in the car going back to her hotel, and she calls Travis, they have a sweet conversation where she tells him how happy she is, and how the crowd must have known she needed a pick me up after the events of the past month, and then we see her get back to her hotel and greet her cats. This one line is so funny to me, she’s petting one of her cats who is mad that she was gone, and she goes, “I know, I was at work.” And it just struck me how odd her job is, right? Like can you imagine coming home after performing for 100k people, you’re Taylor f-ing Swift in your Midnights bodysuit and you’re just telling your pets, I know, I’m sorry, I was at work. Work. Just, crazy. Crazy life this amazing woman has.
She’s running the bath and talking about how she winds down, oh just by signing 2k CDs. Like what? I don’t think I could do that if I had all day my hand would fall off. If you saw that giant marble bathtub and wondered what that hotel is, it’s the Rosewood London, and it is just as posh as you think it is. I’ve never stayed there, because I live here and I can’t afford it even if I needed a hotel in London, but I had a friend stay there once and it was absolutely insane. He stayed during Christmastime and his suite had two christmas trees fully decorated in the room. If you have a few spare grand per night, you can have mermaid time in Taylor Swift’s bathtub.
Episode 2 Recap: “Magic in The Eras”
So that’s where we wrap up episode one, and diving into episode two, entitled Magic in the Eras, which is of course alluding to a lyric from Today is a Fairytale from Speak Now, “magic in the air.”
So it’s appropriate that we open with Taylor in her purple sparkly ballgown for the Speak Now set, and she’s prepping to go on for the Speak Now set, and this purple fog comes in, it’s a beautiful shot. And she’s talking about going into the last night at Wembley in London, which closed out that part of the European leg. She’s about to have a well deserved break after this show. And she’s talking about how much work they’ve all put in to make this tour so special, and while we’re getting this voiceover, we see shots of the dancers, and the band, and all the crew, So we get the title card, Episode 2, Magic in the Eras, and we get the sense that this episode is going to be about the people who created that magic behind the scenes and on the stage. And that’s exactly what this episode is, it’s about the whole team, and all the teamwork.
Then we get shots of rehearsals for what would be the brand new TTPD set that would debut in Paris in May of 2024. She talks about writing and recording Tortured Poets during the first half of the tour, and then we get into how they’re going to incorporate this brand new material into a show that’s already running like clockwork and already telling this story.
So they’re in a break between Asia and Europe, which was only really 8 weeks between closing in Singapore and opening in Paris. So how are they going to do this? And here’s the timeline, I had to go back and look because this blows my mind: the last Singapore show is March 9th. TTPD comes out on April 19. And then the first show back is May 9th. So she and her team have two months to number one take a break, hopefully they did that but it doesn’t sound like it, number two release and promote a brand new massive album, and number three learn an entire new set for the show and figure out how to rearrange the rest so it fits in. That’s a huge undertaking, and I don’t think she or her team ever stops working.
So she tells us that they built a top secret rehearsal facility to put the TTPD set together, and we see her with the band practicing just the music portion. She’s talking about the transition into TTPD musically, and she says, “this feels like a highly elevated chapter,” which, yes it is. In terms of the storytelling of the Eras, TTPD really is kind of the climax of all of these big, heavy emotions she’s been grappling with for a long time.
And this is another point in the series where we really get to see the inner workings of her brain. She talks about surgically tweaking these songs, I’ll do a verse and a pre-chorus of down bad, or I’ll cut out the second verse here, and what she’s doing when she’s putting together these puzzle pieces is figuring out – narratively – what makes the most sense. She’s picking the pieces of these stories, her songs, that convey the emotions she wants to convey to tell this larger story of the TTPD set. She’s taking a red pen to her lyrics, splicing up all these poems, and combining them so that she’s telling a chapter of a story within the book of The Eras Tour.
And the result, when we finally saw the TTPD set, was this incredible narrative, where she starts with “But Daddy I Love Him” going into “So High School”. She’s found this new, incredible love, and she doesn’t care what everyone else thinks. But then the outside world gets very loud and very critical with “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”. She can’t ignore all of this criticism and she’s getting worried and annoyed. Then it falls apart, they break up, and she’s down bad. She’s grieving. And then she moves further into grief with “Fortnight”, looking back on what it was and what it meant, and then she goes into full on anger and rage and regret with “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”. But then she picks herself up, dusts herself off, and she can do it with a broken heart.
She’s combined these songs, parts of these songs, to create a cohesive story. And this scene is a really cool look at how she’s using all of these tools at her disposal – her band, the music, her dancers, the choreography, the sets, the costumes, to bring this story to life. And they, of course, have to rearrange the entire setlist to tell this new part of the story, and she says, “it feels crazy to like take all of the pieces apart and then put them together in a different order.” They’re re-doing the entire show during this short, short break. And she takes this not as an obstacle to fear, but as a challenge, and says “we’re here because we accepted challenges our whole lives.” And this is one thing I really admire about her, is her ability to look at these really hard things as opportunities and stepping stones, and not as a chore or a burden. I wish I could look at more things in my life that way.
So they’ve perfected this new chapter, and we’re now backstage in Paris about to perform it for the first time. They’re in the pre-show huddle, and I love what she says here. I would imagine they are all incredibly nervous, not only because they’ve just been on a break but because this is the first time performing the new show that’s been entirely re-written with this new set. But she says, “we’re going to get to watch 45k people experience the fact that they’re seeing something that’s never been seen before.” She doesn’t say, ‘I know you guys are nervous, but you’re going to do great.’ No. She says, basically, this is an opportunity. We get to watch them. We get to experience this energy in the room. We get to perform for them. And think about how powerful that is as a leader to have that energy. Your boss not saying, ‘I know you’re scared but you have to do this.’ But your boss saying, ‘look at what you get to do. Look at what we get to do.’
Now, our jobs are not as rewarding as the eras tour, and our boss is not as cool as Taylor Swift. But I think a huge part of her success in business is due to this kind of leadership.
So she’s headed to the stage, and she’s excited, and she says “I love having a good secret.” We all rolled our eyes with that one, Taylor. We know you love a good secret and you love torturing us with anticipation. But all that anticipation paid off, TTPD was a welcome, celebrated new addition to the show, we all lost our minds in person and on the livestream, and now we’re fast forwarding a little bit, or circling back around to the last show in London. And there are more good secrets to come for the fans, even though Taylor tells us that it’s a huge amount of extra work to keep things a surprise, because she wants to give us even more, and she wants to perform Florida with Florence, and we get to see how that all came together.
We are now watching the behind the scenes of how the Florida performance was conceptualized, and we zoom in on Amanda Balen and Mandy Moore, the choreographers, who are putting together the choreo for this song. And we get to learn a bit of backstory for both of them, and we learn that Taylor met Mandy through Emma Stone, because she did the choreo for Lala Land, but she’s mostly worked in TV and movies, so moving to a live tour was a departure for her. But, as it turns out, this was a really good fit, because what is dance and movement in film and tv? It’s storytelling. And what did Taylor want the Eras tour to be? Storytelling.
And Mandy tells us, “Now I understand why I was brought in, cause she really wanted to do something different, and she likes the storytelling, I mean, her songs are mini movies.” Yes! That’s exactly it, and I’m so happy to see how Mandy incorporates her storytelling into Taylor’s storytelling, and this really became a symbiotic relationship that is a huge part of what made these performances so special.
Then we get to know Amanda, who is also choreographing, but it seems like she’s more specifically for Taylor’s moves, like modeling these moves that Amanda and Mandy have come up with together. Amanda is/was a professional dancer, and she’s worked on tours with Janet Jackson, Lady Gaga, Celine Dion, etc, and she’d done movies and tv shows too. But her body had started to give out, and she retired her dancing shoes and was just doing choreo when she started working with Taylor and Mandy.
And Amanda tells us, “as much as you want it to last forever, dance isn’t a forever career.” And this quote is so interesting to me because Taylor knows the same thing about her career – it’s not going to last forever, and she’s had these worries about the shelf life of a pop star, the longevity of being a female pop star especially – for a really long time, and she’s told us this in her lyrics and her interviews. So Amanda had kind of accepted that this was it for her, she wasn’t dancing on stage, she was working behind the scenes. But then Taylor and team asked her to be one of the dancers. And she says, “but at the end of the day, even though there was a lot of fear, it was just too wonderful of an opportunity.” And this is a beautiful moment, where she thinks she’s done, and then this new door opens. “It was a second chance that most people don’t get to have,” she says, and you can tell she’s getting emotional. It’s a beautiful story.
Now we’re back to Mandy, and we get to see some earlier clips coming up with the original show. And Mandy says, “Taylor can give me thoughts, or colors, of ideas, and I think I’m able to understand what she wants visually.” So they have this really cool relationship and I think their creativity works in a lot of the same ways. They’re on the same wavelength. For example, Taylor says, “I want it to be like girl in an insane asylum slash wood nymph.” And Mandy doesn’t miss a beat. She’s like, yeah ok, totally get that let’s do that.
But we do get the sense that even though Mandy is coming up with the moves, Taylor is coming up with the concepts and Taylor is totally in charge of the story she’s telling and the emotions she wants to convey with each movement and each scene. And we see this demonstrate when they’re practicing Florida in Wembley, and Taylor sees all this great choreo and stage automations that they’ve put together, and Taylor is worried that the crowd won’t care about it because she and Florence will be up front, and all this cool stuff will be happening behind them. So she changes their position, to be with the dancers on these risers, and this tells me a couple interesting things. One, she knows she’s the main attraction. But two, she wants people to see the whole thing. She wants more attention on the dancers and this whole story they’re telling, and she doesn’t want people just watching her or just watching Flo, because if you’re only watching one person, and ignoring all the rest, you’re missing out on the magic of the whole.
And then we get a little backstory for how this whole was created, and specifically how the dancers came to be a part of the tour. And Taylor tells us that she very intentionally did not want a uniform look, or just these bland professional dancers who are just background. She wanted them to each stand out on their own, and she wanted the audience to be able to connect not only with her, but with everyone on that stage. She wanted a group full of diverse people who could represent what the world looks like, so it’s more relatable and so it’s easier to see yourself in these people who are on stage.
And then we get an interview with everyone’s favorite Eras Tour dancer, Kam Saunders. And he opens with, “Spaces like the space that Taylor is curating on a night to night basis, I wish we had more of that, even outside of entertaining, it’s so important to be seen, to be heard, to be understood.” And I love this quote not just because I love Kam, but because of what it says about this project as a whole, and kind of Taylor’s whole ethos in the tour. She’s trying to build connection through storytelling, and she didn’t want to tell a story where all the characters looked and acted the same. That’s a boring story if you can’t tell one character from another and they’re all interchangeable. Like have you ever watched a tv show where two of the characters look remarkably alike? You know they’re supposed to be different people, but you just can’t tell them apart because they look and act too much alike? You can’t follow that story, and the result is you don’t care about that story. You turn it off one episode in. Taylor didn’t want that, and that’s how we got this amazing crew of incredibly talented, diverse, and unique individuals on the tour.
Then we get to hear a little backstory on Kam, and he tells us that in his career in dance, he had always been told that his looks were the problem. “So what are we going to do about your body?” a director once asked him. And he says, “in life, some people are going to try to tear you down, they want you to do something else, other than the thing that you are in love with.” But Kam persisted. And he says when he got the audition email for The Eras Tour, something told him that he had to be there. That this was something different, something special. So he tells us he couldn’t afford the plane ticket, and he called his brother, who plays in the NFL, Khalen Saunders, who actually played for the Chiefs for a while, has played in super bowls, and his brother got him the flight. So Kam goes into the audition and Mandy is immediately, like yes, this is it. She says “he just embodies what I felt was like the spirit of what these people needed to be.” So Kam set the tone for the cast, and he sets an incredible tone, and he’s just so joyful to watch. And Taylor says something similar, she says, “Kam is someone who absolutely lights up not only the stage, but just our entire vibe as a tour.”
We see a clip of Kam with one of his Bejeweled ad libs, which were definitely one of the highlights of each night for so many of us, and she continues, “I don’t want dancers that blend in. I don’t care about them pulling focus. I want them to pull focus. I want you to feel like you saw an entire crew of individual stars on the stage.” We definitely did. And we’ve already seen these eras tour dancers go on to do such incredible things, and I hope that continues not only for them, but I hope that this kind of casting and this kind of opportunity for openness and diversity in entertainment continues. I hope she set the tone for the future.
And Kam reflects on this, too, and he says my favorite quote of this episode, “Now, knowing that spaces like this do exist for me that allow me to be the fullest version of me with all I have to offer in this body as it exists right now, this feels like my super bowl.” I think this speaks to what we all want in life and in love and in our careers and in our passions, right? What if we could all be loved and valued for exactly who we are, as we are, without having to change to fit in, or adapt for different people or different environments, what would that feel like? What if we could be truly seen for exactly who we are, and in being seen like that, we could let go of all of these other people that we try to be in an effort to be accepted? I want that. I think we all want that.
Now we are closing out this leg of the tour, and we get a subtitle that says, “as each leg of the tour concludes, Taylor prepares bonuses for every dancer, musician, and crew member.” We see her writing these cards for everyone in her dressing room, and she says, “bonus day is so important, because setting a precedent, for the eras tour is really important to me because people who work on the road, if the tour grosses more, they get more of a bonus, and these people just work so hard, and they are the best at what they do, so every single person on the crew, I’ve handwritten them a note.” But as we’re about to learn, it’s not only the cards inside those envelopes that show her appreciation. It’s also the checks. And they are very, very large checks.
But as she’s writing these notes and sealing them with this wax seal (which are very fun and a great christmas gift if you have nerds like me on your christmas list) she goes on, “it’s fun to write the notes, it’s fun to think about everybody’s lives that they’re gonna go back to and the time off they’re gonna have and, you know, the kids they haven’t seen because they’ve been away for months, and it just, making that worthwhile for them is, it just feels like Christmas morning when you finally get to say thank you.”
This whole episode so far has been about her team, and all these people who surround her who make this possible, but this moment is really touching and shows just how special these people are, and how special this tour was. So they’re gathering the envelopes and going to meet with the team. So They’re circled up, and Kam reads the note, and it says,
“Dearest Kam, we’ve traveled the world, like we set out to do. We’ve dazzled the crowds, but we’ve missed family too. My full gratitude doesn’t come from a bank, but here’s (bleeped out amount of money) just to say thanks.” When Kam says that number, everyone loses it. Their hands go up to their faces, and they all start weeping. Now, if you’re curious about the amount, because I know I was, and of course we’re curious about this incredible life that is out of our reach. But fun fact, I am partially deaf so I’m pretty good at lip reading. I believe it’s $750,000 for the dancers, at least. We know the truck drivers each got 100 grand. And this is such a cool moment, and in my mind, she’s showing us this for a couple of reasons.
Number one, she wants to set a precedent, just like she told us when she was writing the notes. She wants to change this industry, and she wants other artists who also make millions to do the same thing for their crews. She can’t set a precedent if no one knows about it. I think that’s her number one motivation for showing us this in the doc. But number two, it also adds to this mythology of the eras tour, and adds to this mythology of the story she’s telling. It makes it feel even more grand and even more groundbreaking, if she’s not only breaking records with ticket sales, and stadium attendance, and gross revenue, but she’s also handing out these unheard of bonuses for everyone who helped her put on this show. She also, by the way, gave enormous donations to food banks in every single city where the tour stopped. So I’ve seen a couple of complaints online, like why does she need to publicize this bonus stuff, but I have to say, people who are so full of themselves and their wealth don’t often brag about how much they give away. She’s proud of what she can do for others, because she knows that it’s those people who allow her, who help her, to do what she does and to do what she loves. So that’s just my two cents on this bonus day scene.
So now we’re back at Wembley rehearsing Florida, and Taylor talks a little bit about how she’s learned choreography. And as we see her practicing, she tells us, “everybody’s got those things they’re good at, it’s taken me a really long time to even be fine at choreography. And this is a major criticism that’s always been lobbed at Taylor – she can’t dance. She’s not a natural mover, and I think that speaks to the expectations of pop stars, right? They’re not only supposed to be beautiful and tall and skinny, and have the perfect voice, and write their own songs, and they have to be able to dance perfectly to those songs live on stage while singing. So I think the world has been really hard on her for something that just doesn’t come naturally to her, but when the eras tour started, I think we could all tell something had changed in that deparemtnet. And she’s about to tell us why.
“Mandy knows how to approach teaching me choreography from a lyrical perspective,” she says, “I don’t do 8 counts, I learn based on what syllable of the lyric I’m attaching a movement to, and I can’t really learn any other way, I’ve tried.” And we can see her doing this in real time as she’s practicing Florida, with each movement she’s singing or speaking the lyrics as she does the movements, because that’s how she learns. So I think it’s so cool that she found this method that works for her, and she found this person that she just clicks with and can translate these different talents into a language that Taylor understands and can resonate with.
And she goes on, “learning the choreography, it’s not just doing a step for the sake of doing a step, it’s all very visual, and it makes sense to me narratively.” We’re back to the storytelling of it all, and if you make dance tell a story, or a part of the storytelling, that’s when it clicks for Taylor. I love it, because she’s shown us all along that this is how her mind works, and to see this behind the scenes of how it all came together is just incredible.
Now we’re back to Kam, and we get to meet his mom, Kim, who seems like just an incredible woman and an incredible mother. She’s at the London show, and we get the sense that she’s a VIP, right? Because of course she is, she’s Kam’s mom! And we get to see this really sweet moment between them, where she’s telling her son how special this experience has been for her, and Kam just loses it. He’s so emotional, and so grateful, and he says, “I’ve watched you make so many sacrifices, so many, for us to be able to do what we’re doing.” He’s talking about himself and his brother, the NFL player, and he goes on, “Being able to do what we love to do in such grand spaces, it’s a product of how you love us.” And she just nods and says, “I do.” Like, of course I love you, and of course I’d do anything for you.
And I have to say, being a mother of 3, watching this moment, I know how Kim feels. Because you’d do anything for your kids, but I think the really special aspect of this relationship, and also the relationship between Taylor and her mom that we also get to see, is how much respect they have for their kids and who they are and what they want. They’re not these controlling, judgmental parents who have to be overly involved, but they appreciate their children for exactly who they are. And it’s obvious to see that when they were children, they were given that space and that freedom to grow and to desire things, no matter if it was unrealistic to the adult. No matter if the adult thought it was a pipe dream. The parents still supported them. Neither of these parents said, “oh I don’t know honey, you should focus on your other talents, because this one isn’t going to get you anywhere,” or, “no you can’t do that because that’s not a real career.” Instead they fostered creativity, and they let their children be exactly who they are, no matter if it was something they approved of or not. Those are magical parents, right there, and I think it’s incredibly rare, and incredibly special to be able to have that type of parent not only in childhood, but in adulthood as well.
So, zooming away from Kam, now we’re back in the stadium, and Florence joins rehearsal. And this is where we get the most important line so far in the docuseries, and it comes from Florence as she’s talking about Taylor. She says, “We’re similar in that the persona is huge, but the person is soft, and so I think that’s why we get along.” And what she’s referring to here is the showgirl versus the girl, which I covered a lot in my last video dissecting the themes of The Life of a Showgirl.
Florence and the Machine and Taylor Swift, two huge personas. These are the facades they put on in the spotlight. This is their commercial appeal, this is their brand, this is the show. So what she means when she says “the persona is huge” is that the show is so much bigger than the girl.
Then there’s the girl inside, who also just happens to bear the same name. But they’re not the same. One is out on stage built to entertain, and makes herself bigger, and looms large over this industry, and makes herself the mirrorball. But the girl inside is just human. “The person is soft”, is what Florence says about this other half of them. And a lot of what Showgirl is grappling with is how these two parts of herself intersect, and how they are battling one another, and how one can make life very difficult for the other. I just love this quote from florence so much because it sums up both Taylor, and what it means to be a brand in the public eye when you’re a human being so perfectly.
So Flo goes on, “externally, the thing is really big, but like, when we’re together, we’re just like silly and goofy.” And we see this demonstrated as they’re practicing and dancing around and just being themselves. But when they’re practicing, they’re still the person. They’re not the persona yet. They’ll put that on, put on those costumes and those layers built to protect themselves and project themselves, and that’s when Taylor Swift becomes Taylor Swift Inc, and that’s when Florence Welch becomes Florence and the Machine.
And that’s what we’re going to see next as we head toward showtime. We see clips of Kam’s mom dancing, out of her wheelchair, which yes, girl, do it, and then during we are never ever getting back together, we get to see Kam do his “naw, bruv” for the last night in London. Such the perfect closing British line.
Then we get to see the performance of Florida on real film, in high def for the first time! So we see Flo, under the stage, and we can tell she is nervous. She’s fidgeting, she’s making scared faces at the crew, but she climbs onto the platform, and as the drums hit, the platform rises, and she raises her arms, and the crowd goes wild, and she is suddenly a different Florence. She is the persona. And we’ve talked about it, and Florence has talked about it, but to see it in real time, this putting on this alternate personality, becoming this other person, it happens right before our eyes, and suddenly she’s not nervous anymore. She’s totally confident and self-assured, and starts singing.
And we get to hear her reflect on this in an interview afterwards, and she says, “The feeling of coming up for the first time in that lift, it was kind of like landing on Mars. Cause I’d never seen the stage lit up before, the sound of the crowd, that was really extraordinary. You know, it’s like you see this cultural moment from the outside and I suddenly was like inside of it. It was wild, but it was really fun and completely terrifying. Also, Taylor’s my friend, and I know her as like this very cozy person, and I came out of that lift, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s fucking Taylor Swift!”
So not only did we see Florence put on her persona of Florence and the Machine, but we also got to hear her reaction to seeing Taylor Swift for the first time. Not Taylor Swift, human friend who is cozy and writes songs with her at home, but Taylor Swift Incorporated, Taylor Swift the cultural phenomenon, Taylor Swift the powerhouse, Taylor Swift the icon. We’ve never gotten to see this before, this behind the scenes of what it takes to put this on. And not just this show, but this world. This world requires you to be a different person, it requires you to split personalities in order to survive.
Just like Taylor had to compartamentalize all these horrible, violent things happening around her, but she also compartamentalizes these two sides of herself, and Florence does too. Because you have to. If you put that human vulnerability out on stage, you will have nothing left for yourself, for that person inside. You have to become inhuman for a while on stage, then you can step off and be yourself again. It’s a protective measure. It’s so incredible that we got to see these themes that Taylor has been discussing for a while but especially in The Life of a Showgirl, we got to see this play out in real time, and demonstrate what it’s really like to live, to love, the life of a showgirl. It’s not a life that’s inherently loveable, and she has all of these measures in place to make this life bearable. There’s a huge amount of joy and excitement that comes with being this enormous pop star, but there’s also a huge amount of sacrifice and planning and carefully plotting your path.
So this episode closes with So Long London playing as we zoom out over Wembley, and we get one final voiceover from Taylor, and she says, “I used be leaving the shows and watch people walk home, and I thought, I hope they got what they’ve been waiting for. There’s a feeling I have of such pride and satisfaction, because when I leave The Eras Tour, I never wonder that. There’s just like this magic in the air. All these particles of shimmer and glitter and confetti and girlhood and friendship bracelet beads, and you know, magic in the Eras.” Or course that’s our episode title, fitting way to close episode 2. And the episode closes with a closeup of a friendship bracelet on the stadium floor strewn with confetti, and the bracelet reads “Swiftie.”
Is this an easter egg for what’s to come in episode 3? Maybe. I do hope that at some point we get to hear from some fans about what Taylor means to them, because I think that could really help tell the other side of the story, right? I love seeing what the tour means to taylor and the dancers and the band and the crew, but it would be amazing to hear from some fans who got to go what that really meant to them. I don’t know if we’ll get any of this, but I would love to see that.
Summary & Outro
So that’s our first two episodes, the next pair of episodes 3 and 4 drop on Friday the 19th, probably also at 12am pacific, and it takes me a while to watch these, write up my thoughts and my reactions, and then find a time when my house is quiet enough to record this for you, so I hope that next week will follow the same schedule of episode released on ______, and I’ll try to do the same for the final two episodes which will be released on boxing day, day after christmas, but all my kids will be home so I don’t know if i’ll be able to get it out quickly.
What was your favorite moment in these episodes, and what struck you or made you think or made you cry? Let me know in the comments. Look out for me in my red striped t-shirt in the doc, if I make it in, I hope so, and thanks so much for listening to this recap. I can’t wait for the next episodes, and please like, subscribe, leave a review on your podcast app, and come back next week for more. Thanks so much for being here, see you next time.
