There are 15 minutes left before the end: the last concert of The tour of eras. Taylor Swift is in a circle, clinging to her backing vocalists, her dancers, her musicians. Try giving a motivational speech. Swallow. “Everyone talks about phenomena like The tour of eras, as if it was something where everything fell into place by chance,” the 35-year-old artist tells his gang, with tears in his eyes. “It’s the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced. Tonight we took on this challenge.
This is how the first episode of the sixth of The end of an era (The End of an Era, Disney+), the documentary on its creation The tour of erasthe biggest tour ever, with 10 million spectators in 149 concerts and billions raised and generated. The project is a review of how Swift invented and perfected this three-hour-plus piece of machinery that he performed in front of thousands of spectators every evening in a major city around the world, from Los Angeles to Mexico, from Madrid to Vancouver. As her collaborators reveal on camera, neither she nor they nor anyone ever thought it could become the enormous global, social, cultural and economic phenomenon that it is. Nor any of the challenges they were going to face, like the attempted bombing in Vienna that caused three of the concerts to fail.
Swift is presented as the brains of the entire operation, a major perfectionist who controls every step of her tour and, of course, her career. Even if he is also perceived as someone close (he comes to recognize that his life is sometimes almost unreal), excited at the idea of rehearsing, close to his fans, of whom he also often shows images. After all, the series was made by and for his greater glory, it is true. But on the other hand, it humanizes her, with her mistakes, her successes, her nerves, her decisions, her problems… Today, a year after finishing said tour, the project in collaboration with the Disney factory – six chapters, two every Friday, plus the last concert in Vancouver – is perhaps late or even opportunistic, in line with the artist’s new album (the second that she releases during or after the tour), but as the images show, and in a style that characterizes each of the artist’s decisions, everything is thought out: He shot everything from the beginning, from the first day of rehearsal, three years ago, months before starting the tour.
Welcome to the era touras the first episode is called, pulls the thread to tell the details of the tour, mixed with the singer’s life. It’s telling to watch Swift disappear from the stadium just seconds after finishing each concert, get in a car, drive to her hotel, fill the bathtub, get rid of her false eyelashes and, she says, order food from room service and sign 2,000 records until she falls exhausted at four in the morning.
But the focal point of the beginning is what was the worst moment of the tour and one of the worst of Swift’s life: when she canceled all three concerts planned for Vienna, Austria, in August 2024 after an attempted terrorist attack. There, he felt fear, “like I was skating on a patch of ice,” he said. “We could have had a massacre,” he admits, and his voice breaks immediately, remembering the terrorist attack a week before at a Liverpool dance school, in which a man with a knife attacked a group of girls and killed three of them, aged between six and eleven.
“I’m going to meet some of their families tonight…and then I’ll do a pop concert, you know?” Swift says with irony and pain, barely able to articulate a word, in one of the moments where she exposes herself the most: she knows that what she does, even if it is important for millions of people, is ultimately a concert, while behind it there are human lives. But also that he must give the maximum to his fans. After these tears, he recognizes that he is not going to cry anymore, that he will then be stuck for three and a half hours of to showand that he will behave “like an airplane pilot” who must remain calm in the face of turbulence. Their dancers and team recognize that the concert is something important that influences the lives of many people and that it is a great responsibility for them to be present and perform for them.
He reveals that he never landed in Vienna, that he was on the plane when he learned of the attempted attack and decided to cancel the recitals. Thus, the following concerts, those in London, which closed the European part of his tour, were very important: he had to do them, but also that they took place as quickly as possible. “I’ve been an actor for 20 years, but mentally, being afraid that something will happen to your fans is a new challenge,” he admits as he listens to an audiobook in front of them. watch. “I want to keep my nerves away from the audience, because when you’re the leader of the show, they can feel every change,” she explains, like a perfectionist. “And in the Tour of the eras“I feel a very physical reaction from my nerves,” she told her mother. “I’m very nervous, very agitated,” she explains. Her friend Ed Sheeran appears in the dressing room and she tells him that after London and during the summer vacation, she wants to go where no one will find her. “I don’t want to be hunted down like an animal. “I felt very persecuted,” she said.
Another of the most difficult moments is when it is explained that, each of the five nights in London, before the Wembley concerts, the artist “met privately with the survivors and families of the victims of the tragic Southport attack”. Then you see her, already dressed for the to showwalking down the hall to her dressing room full of flowers, crying all the time, alone.
“You helped them. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but you consoled them,” his mother told him, the cameras trained on them from a safe distance. “On a mental level, I live in a reality that is most of the time very unreal,” she later admits. “But it’s part of my job to be able to deal with those feelings and find the energy to take action. That’s the way it should be.” Yet, until the moment she enters the stage, she is distraught, serious. Then, the smile. At the end, full of joy: “We’re back! I had a great time. Everyone was very happy. We’re back!” he cries. “I’m so happy, it’s like the audience feels like they have to cheer me on.”
In its first two 45-minute episodes (the third and fourth will arrive on December 19; the last two, on December 26) the ins and outs of a very complex tour are revealed, but perhaps not as much as the fans hoped – such as the choice of costumes, the surprise songs, the extension of the concerts, the writing of their albums during the tour – so they will have to give them time. From the first scenes, details are seen: maps, plans, models, dozens of ordered objects. post-it. The idea for the tour came to her two years before she started the run, Swift acknowledges in her first on-camera interview, and says it was due to the mixing of two events or two “unpleasant” ideas. The first is that her first six albums were purchased by a third party and that she lost control of this music (she took it back in May). He decided to re-record it and remember “all the girls” he was. “It gave me an idea: to celebrate the past,” he admits. “I think the second factor was the pandemic,” he admitted, about releasing two albums in the midst of covid-19. “What if I did a tour that celebrates all these moments with chapters divided into albums and everything changes at the end of each chapter?
Her musicians remember their first rehearsals, when they didn’t even know what the tour was going to be called, but she knew very well how to go about it. “It was three hours, it was crazy. I wondered what we were going to take out. We added three songs,” says his bassist, who demonstrates how he plays in the showers so as not to disturb the others. In addition, for example, it details how the concert is created, the platforms that raise and lower the singer, the underground automatic balls through which she moves, or what it was like to incorporate a whole set of songs from her new album into the second part of the concerts.
“We have the best in the entire industry,” Swift admits of her collaborators; He explains, for example, that Emma Stone recommended him to her choreographer, Mandy Moore, with whom he worked on The The Earth. She also participated in the casting process so that her dancers were diverse and real people. “I didn’t want people in uniform,” he admits. In the second episode, he shows how he writes notes that he seals with wax for each of his team members, in which he grants them prime economical, at the end of each leg of the to show (which lasted 20 months). “It’s like Christmas morning,” he said excitedly. He films the excited dancers as he gives them the envelopes, but although they read the message, the amount is hidden. Swift delivered a total of $197 million in prime to its employees; The truckers alone took $100,000 each.
“We could have filled 255 stadiums,” one of his agents says of when ticket sales began when barely two dozen shows were announced, which turned into 150. Glendale, Arizona, where the tour began, changed its name to Swift City. During this time, she rehearsed in a “detailed, methodical, exhaustive” way to be ready for her fans. “Welcome to the era tour» was the phrase with which she greeted her viewers every evening, and that’s what she called the first episode of her docuseries.
The footage shows bright and special moments, like when he brought Ed Sheeran on stage, with whom he has a great personal relationship and has been singing for over a decade. In the second chapter, we see her rehearsals and performance with Florence Welch in London. Her fiancé, Travis Kelce, is also in the images. Here appears a narrative that was also repeated in the trailer: that their ways of earning a living are very similar, with hard work behind them, sacrifices and coaches, in her case, her mother, as they say between jokes. “There are people who take vitamin D, I have these conversations with you,” she laughs.
The first of the two chapters of the documentary has more interesting content, about the tour and about Swift, while the second is more focused on the rehearsals and the dancers. In all of this, Swift always focuses on the ultimate goal: creating a perfect product for fans, surprising them every night and exciting them. “There are many moments of eye contact,” he admits. “I see their joy. There’s a lot of emotion. You look at the audience and it’s more than a lot of lights. There are millions of stories that coincide in a place where we can feel safe expressing a lot of emotion. It’s a very powerful thing.”
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