Taylor Swift Kicked Off Her Arlington Concerts Like the Icon She Is, No Matter Who Disagrees

A house appears in the background set of Taylor Swift’s new Eras tour. Throughout the show, it changes from the house seen in her “Lover” video to the moss-roofed cabin on which she performed at the 63rd Grammys, then back to an empty, skeletal "Lover" house burning in a massive inferno. The meaning of this symbolism is dividing TikTokers.

What is indisputable is that with her Eras tour, which is making a record-breaking three consecutive stops at Arlington’s AT&T Stadium Friday through Sunday, Swift has fully allowed fans — nearly 70,000 of them on Friday — to get cozy once again inside the private quarters of her life, one we’ve come to know and dissect.

Now 33, Swift has united listeners through these musical reference points for more than half of her life. Since her self-titled debut at age 16, she’s published with each album an anthology of lyrical memoirs, letting fans in on an inner world more expansive than any franchised film universe; it’s replete with stories of extraordinary strength, a surplus of famed villains, heroes and even product placement: “Dancing in your Levi’s,” “Dom Pérignon, you brought it,” “Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes.” Tickets for the Arlington shows started at $500, despite Swift’s and her litigious fans’ protests, but if ever a concert was worth a splurge, it was this elaborately staged tour through Swift’s discography. Because of the pandemic, Swift is touring for her last three albums for the first time. She started out with the Lover portion of the setlist, with “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,“ close to 8 p.m., followed by “Cruel Summer” (there was no St. Vincent cameo this evening, which was disappointing) and “You Need to Calm Down,” though no one could. Fans had camped out for merch the day before the shows began, and their concert fashion did not disappoint. A palette of pastel fabrics seemed to paint the entire space surrounding the stage, with enough sequins to light up all of Texas.

Those who perhaps haven't followed Swift's style evolution were still in cowboy hats, and one woman in cat ears and a cat T-shirt waved around a stuffed cat toy anytime Swift came near her on the stadium’s ramp — which, bless her, she did often. The singer, in multicolored nails and her signature cat-eye liner and red lips, praised her openers MUNA and her first act, Gayle, whom Swift called an “amazing artist from Nashville.” As many North Texans know, the “abcdefu” singer is from Plano. Swift is seemingly never out of the spotlight — just this week, she received a key to the city of Arlington  and had a street renamed for her; a city in Arizona briefly renamed itself in her honor; she was name-dropped during Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski accident trial; and a security guard at one her concerts gained massive fame for dancing and singing along while on the job. Her career has long been an ascending arc, and it’s hard to imagine there are still higher strata to be conquered, especially after a year when her album streams broke records yet again.

The show business milestones she has yet to achieve — maybe a Super Bowl halftime show (though she’s said to have turned it down this year), EGOT wins, an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — are mere clichés at this point. There’s hardly a bigger music star than Swift. The fact is the curly-haired kid whose dream propelled her family to move to Nashville now wields more political clout than the pope.

Few people have gone from country star to pop titan to feminist icon, and the spectacular impact of her Eras tour has been praised from The Atlantic to The New York Times.

Early on in her Arlington show, she appeared before her constituency of Swifties with a blue acoustic guitar. “By the way, I’ll be your host this evening. My name is Taylor,” she said, like we were just sitting down at TGI Friday’s for some subpar onion rings.

Instead she’d serve up a mouthful of unattainable romance with “Lover.”
The crowd hardly sat at all during her three-hour set. The balcony seats twinkled with fans’ light-up bracelets. Those with floor seats stood shoulder to shoulder by their flimsy folding chairs. There was no dancing space, but women in the audience sang to each other with eyes closed.

Swift ditched the guitar for “The Archer,” which she punctuated with a shower of smoke and a sparkling cascade of lights. As she sang the words “All of my enemies started out friends,” even the most casual Swift listener could probably think of some names — Scooter Braun, Kanye West, Karlie Kloss, who fit the description.

Her hands came together in a heart symbol, a salute to her longtime fans. In a sparkling dress with long fringe, she danced with her musicians, all in black leather, as she delved quickly into Fearless and its self-titled song first.
“Are you ready to go back to high school?” she asked, prompting the strongest singalong until that moment with “You Belong With Me,” as a gold-lighted platform raised her above her subjects.

Naturally, the song was followed by “Love Story," as a shower of laser lights poured off the stage and filled the air. Something about Swift’s skipping and laughing seemed knowing, like she embraces her early hit songs about teenage love with pure, accepting sentimentality. Though her girlish-toned smash hits gave way to far more sophisticated songwriting in the last decade — she’s now one of the few major artists making records with a cohesive narrative thread rather than focusing on releasing monster singles — Swift can reinvent herself without disavowing her past work.

Soon she’d take us into the woods, in a cape, for Evermore. Other than the show-stopping numbers, Swift’s choreography was fairly natural. Though she’s a gifted vocalist and respectably showy showwoman, there were no wild gymnastics — physical or vocal — to distract from her lyrics, which remain the core of her work.

“We have some stuff to catch up on,” she said before thanking fans for supporting her rerecorded album releases (“the worst idea,” as she says was told), a move she made after her masters were sold from under her.

As she sang “Champagne Problems,” the audience’s words echoed through the arena.

Onscreen, her custom black-and-red Christian Louboutin boots stomped along to the sound of a snake hissing, anticipating the portion dedicated to songs from Reputation.

An image of a cobra appeared onscreen as she went through “Ready For it?” ending in “Look What You Made Me Do” in a black one-legged jumpsuit with an embroidered bedazzled snake, fully owning the time when Kimye fans tried to “cancel” her over a (let’s oversimplify) misunderstanding with Kanye West, by leaving snake emojis on her posts.

As she moved on beat with her dancers, the stadium was flooded in red light and smoke. “The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now … why? Because she’s dead,” the audience screamed out while a split screen showed Swift from three different angles. Perfect.

The snake’s face appeared onscreen.

The set was ever-changing, as were Swift’s costumes. More impressive than the number of wardrobe changes was the speed with which she reappeared newly changed and unfrazzled.

One sequence showed a wall of dancers dressed like Swift in various stages of her career, as a cheerleader, as a circus ringleader. She would soon appear in a princess-like gown — the kind that so impressed Aretha — the richest girl at prom, looking like a young Nicole Kidman in near-permanent bangs, strawberry blonde hair, timeless, poreless.

Her show, like the near entirety of her work, is an exercise in self-reflection, a character study of one, like a non-toxic Eminem. It’s not even a hot take to defend Swift’s artistry anymore. Even Damon Albarn retracted his suggestion she wasn’t a “real” songwriter last year after receiving ample backlash for his comments.

But some still regard Swift as a vanilla pop-dispensing vending machine, a Basic Beyoncé for suburban women discovering the pain of falling for an avoidant type. Some critics may have blanked out on her words somewhere around “Wee-hee are never, evur, evurr getting back togethurr,” ignoring the larger messages in her words in and out of the studio.

A poised, sample-sized star singing into an expensive vintage microphone about breaking up with a movie star before moving on to another may be disconnected from the reality of most of her listeners, but her feelings are universal, no matter what upgrades surround their setting.
Swift’s artful oversharing allows fans to learn from her example, and even her privileged position demonstrates the non-privilege faced by women always, how even the most famous star on the planet is still vulnerable to sexual assault. At her own event.

But Swift is freed from the punishing restraints of martyrdom. A scene in her 2020 documentary Miss Americana shows a moment when the singer learns on the phone that she was snubbed for any major Grammys for Reputation.

“This is fine,” she says. “I just need to make a better record.”

That enlightened self-awareness carries through in lyrics that have become mantras in personal responsibility: “Hi, it’s me, I’m the problem, it's me,” or “In my defense I have none, for never leaving well enough alone.”

Swift returned in a black hat — which she would soon gift to an audience member — and cabaret shorts with a T-shirt reading “We are never getting back together like ever,” to sing “22” and ‘Trouble.”

She then told the crowd she was “wondering if you had 10 minutes to spare,” before the extended version of “All Too Well,” which is frankly way too long to devote to Jake Gyllenhaal, but was a highlight nonetheless.
Swift sat atop the cabin with a burning chimney for the folklore section of the tour, later twirling in a white gown. “I’m dressed like a Victorian ghost,” she joked.

As she told the audience, folklore was the first album on which she wasn’t “excruciatingly autobiographical.”

“There are so many stories in the world, and not all of them are about me,” she said before going into “Betty” and “American Dynasty.”

For the audience, no song was a non-anthem, no missed opportunity to close their eyes to best feel the lyrics.

“Style” led into 1989’s “Blank Space,” followed by “Shake It Off” and “Wildest Dreams.”

The whole stadium lit up again in red for “Bad Blood” as the onscreen house burned. The show gave the entire audience a hot flash with fire shooting up all around the arena.

“This is the part of the show I love because it's different every time,” the singer said soon after the brief acoustic portion of the concert — starting with the “simple, wistful, tragic song,” as she called “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” on a guitar with glittery strings that she traded for a piano for the live debut of “Ours.”

Swift performed a bit of a magic trick then, an illusion in which she appeared to dive into the stage. She emerged soon after in a lavender coat among floating clouds with “Lavender Haze” and the final portion of the setlist, seven songs off her newly released album Midnights, including the hit “Anti-Hero” and the enchanting slow pop ballad “Mastermind.”

“There’s one more song,” she warned an audience so lost in Taylor’s world that not a single soul headed for the exit to beat the nightmarish exiting traffic.

Closing out with “Karma,” she showered the audience in confetti and words of appreciation. It was a fitting choice to end the set. Her enemies started as friends, and now, well, look what you made her do.