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The Eras Tour review: Taylor Swift's concert film traces her musical evolution and growth as a gifted songwriter
Taylor Swift glides through eras, colours, styles, and moods with a buttery smoothness in a concert film that's designed and curated for posterity.
I'm not the Swifty who would wait all night for Taylor Swift's new album 1989 (Taylor's Version) to drop or travel to another city to watch her new concert film, The Eras Tour, on an IMAX screen, like how Christopher Nolan geeks do. Nor was the theatre I saw The Eras Tour in was packed with Swifties dancing and singing along with the popstar. But I still thoroughly enjoyed her concert film as a party of one or even as a spoken poetry fest.
Poetry before pop
To me, personally, Taylor Swift was always a poet before a popstar. Her deeply resonant and intricately layered lyrics are testament to her command over the language, the metre, and the art of storytelling. I wouldn't be surprised if she pulls off a Bob Dylan sometime and wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sign that petition already!
Sure, Taylor's area of expertise in her songwriting may be limited to love – or the messy process of getting out of it – but what she writes about can't discount how she writes about it. Which other songwriter uses words like ‘clandestine’ and 'Machiavellian' in their pop songs? She even forcefits them in the metre, but they always fall easy on the ears because of her ability to change the rhythm of her breath according to her lyrics.
Seriously, sample these words: “'Cause karma is my boyfriend, Karma is a god. Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend. Karma's a relaxing thought. Aren't you envious that for you it's not?” Or these: “You did some bad things, but I'm the worst of them. Sometimes I wonder which one will be your last lie. They say looks can kill and I might try.” These are deliciously derisive, yet instantly empowering.
But there are also the ones that turn the scrutiny within. Like these: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid. So I've been scheming like a criminal ever since. To make them love me and make it seem effortless. This is the first time I've felt the need to confess. And I swear I'm only cryptic and Machiavellian 'Cause I care.” These words are more of a confession than a derision.
This balance between savagery and introspection makes Taylor Swift the most reflective songwriter of our times. Which is why watching The Eras Tour in an almost-empty theatre made me feel like I'm at a spoken poetry event, where Taylor is directly speaking to me, making my experiences her own, and giving voice to a latent, embedded complexity that I never could.
Visually and aurally sumptuous
Director Sam Wrench must take all the credit for making The Eras Tour an immersive and visually wholesome concert movie. He never lets Taylor seem aware of the cameras around so that her umbilical chord with the live audience never gets cut. Her fans, hooting, dancing, singing, flashing their smartphone screens, and crying – crying a lot – serve more as her co-stars than just a homogeneous sea of validation.
The Eras Tour almost serves as a biopic of Taylor Swift, thanks to her semi-autobiographical lyrics and the graph that she slowly and surely etches from her first album to the latest. From the ‘high school era' to the ‘acoustic set,’ she warmly lets in the audience into every phase of her life and career. As the flashlights and glow bands change colour with every album, it visually also feels like the end and start of multiple eras.
It's the crests and troughs the sound flows through that makes one gauge the rich versatility of Taylor Swift, often discredited for her limited pop range. From Our Song (country-pop), Speak Now (pop-rock), Red (dance-pop), Reputation (electropop), Lover (dream-pop), Folklore (alt-rock), to Midnights (synth-pop), Taylor's musical evolution is on full display in The Eras Tour.
She switches from her high-school girl energy to the vamp vibes as casually as she moves from the guitar to the piano. Taylor still croons the bubble gum ballads Love Story and You Belong With Me with as much heart as the spite with which she belts out break-up anthems like Bad Blood and Look What You Made Me Do.
That possibly explains the wide reach and immense depth of Taylor Swift's appeal: her music assures you it's okay to revisit, and even celebrate, how you once felt, but also pushes you to identify patterns of toxicity and keep breaking out of them. It makes you forgive, but never forget.
