10 Things We Learned From Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour Book’
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour-commemorating hardback book hit stores Friday, just nine days before she performs the show for the final time. And as much as we thought we knew about these concerts from the 21 months of it being dissected, the pop superstar still has some things to reveal about the epic, record-breaking outing in “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour Book.”
The tome went on sale exclusively in Target stores at the crack of dawn on Black Friday. Fans lined up before store doors opened at virtually every U.S. location, not just for the book but for the first vinyl and CD iterations of the deluxe version of “The Tortured Poets Department,” which are also exclusive to the retailer. The book was only being sold in brick-and-mortar stores Friday, but it also goes on sale via Target’s app and webstore as of Saturday morning.
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The 256 pages of “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour Book” are very, very photo-driven, with only intermittent written passages to interrupt the 500-plus photographic images. Still, especially considering that Swift has not talked much about the tour in interviews, there’s enough text there to offer fans some facts they didn’t already know, in many cases. Here are 10 things we learned about the tour from the book:
Swift reveals a total attendance figure for the entire nearly-two-year tour.
She does not reveal grosses for her tours, leaving that to business writers to estimate. But she does give a number for how many attendees the Eras Tour played to: 10.1 million fans, in 152 stadiums in 51 cities on five continents.
She has a favorite song of the show to perform.
Swift’s “favorite moment of the night” comes during the closing “Midnights” segment. And it’s not to do with one of her hit singles, but a deeper album cut: “Vigilante Shit.” “It’s just the most fun I’ve ever had, that one. The chair choreography! The catty, vengeful, mischievous personas we get to try on and play with.”
She has a favorite re-entry point of the night.
The “Reputation” part of show “included my favorite entrance of the night,” she says. “I always imagined the sound of mysterious footsteps lining up perfectly with the ominous synth beats of ‘…Ready for It?’”
She spoke more than a dozen languages on the tour… at least for the length of an introductory phrase.
Swift learned how to say “Welcome to the Eras tour” in 15 different languages.
Swift and her dancers are literally playing chess at one point, unbeknown to anyone in the audience except maybe the most attentive — and high-up — attendees.
You always figured Swift was playing three-dimensional chess… but no, in the Eras Tour, it’s a real thing. During the song “Mastermind,” Swift writes, “we recreate a chessboard and when I signal the dancers to move to different spots on the board, they actually create the exact sequence for a checkmate.”
That hovercraft-type vehicle she rides around on during the witchy “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” is not remotely operated.
“The ‘rover’ platform I travel on is actually operated by a crew member, who lays inside the platform and drives it from inside,” Swift writes. It comes amid the “Tortured Poets Department” segment, which was rehearsed in secret before she put that album out mid-tour. In this section, Swift “wanted to create the illusion of an alien abduction, a battle scene, a religious institution, a mental institution, a haunted house, and a showgirl’s dressing room routine. It was ambitious as hell but we pulled it off, creating what I think is the most dramatic, cathartic, female-rage-driven part of the night.”
Although she can’t control the weather, she has a thing for the color coding that can happen with the magic hour, when it coincides with the start of her set.
“I always adored when the sunset happened at the same time as the Lover era, just pink skies on pink skies,” she writes.
Yes, there’s an airbag, not an actual arena-length lap pool, awaiting her when she takes a dive each night after the acoustic segment.
OK, so maybe we’d already guessed Swift is not actually going for a swim at that moment. But neither is she jumping directly into the arms of stagehands. Following the second surprise song, “the stage becomes an ocean and I ‘dive’ into it, which involves a lot of blind faith and a big airbag under the stage,” she writes. “It’s the coolest illusion of the night and I’ll never forget the sound of the crowd the first time they saw it, somewhere between shock, horror, and elation.”
Once she started doing mashups during the surprise acoustic songs portion of the shows, there were two different ways in which she chose to pair songs.
In case you were wondering what the mashed-up tunes had to do with one another, sometimes the connection was thematic, sometimes strictly musical. She writes that, having exhausted nearly her entire catalog in individual performances during the surprise segment, “I started mashing up two or three songs that go together thematically or rhythmically.”
Swift has eight different color-coded acoustic guitars, and 15 differently colored microphones, at her disposal during the shows.
At least these are the numbers of guitars and mics shown all lined up and ready to go in behind-the-scenes photos.
Fans have her business nemeses to thank — sort of, indirectly — for the Eras Tour.
No, the names of Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun are never mentioned in the book. But she does say that being compelled to record do-overs of her Big Machine catalog led to the idea of covering her entire career so thoroughly in one night… along with the fact that she’d released four all-new albums since her prior tour by the time she got to this one. “In another realm of my priorities was my passion project: re-recording my first six albums that were sold away from me by my former record label,” she writes. “Reclaiming my past made me fall back in love with it. Revisiting that past work made me want to honor it and honor what the fans had done for me with the Taylor’s Version albums.”
Beyond addressing so many specific moments in her nightly sets, Swift writes generally about what the Eras Tour has meant to her, her fans and the culture.
“I heard so many people say that the Eras Tour felt like a safe space, a place for radical girlhood, boyhood or personhood and unapologetic joy,” she writes. “The Eras Tour had no typical age demographic or stereotypical attendee. It was for everyone, because you made everyone feel included. … My hope is that you won’t get that behavior end with the end of the Era Tour. … My hope is that you find ways to create these spaces around you in your daily life, your school, your job. That would be a real legacy to leave.”
And, she notes in another passage, “We would go on to play this show in the pouring rain, in the blazing heat, in the thickest humidity, in the wildest winds, and in the bitter heat. We would do it if we were sick or exhausted or injured. We would do it with a broken heart … We do it because peple need an escape from how brutal life can be, and it is the honor of a lifetime to be that for them, if only for a night. And although we are all on our own in this big scary life, somehow it doesn’t feel that way when we’re singing the same words as 80,000 other people wearing glittery face paint.”
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