“It feels like the Eras Tour was a lifetime within my life,” Taylor Swift said earlier this week at an intimate New York City screening of the first two episodes of The End of an Era, the six-part docuseries pulling back the curtain on her record-breaking Eras Tour. Those episodes, as well as Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour: The Final Show, a concert film capturing the entirety of her final bow of the 149-show tour, hit Disney+ on Friday, a day before Swift’s 36th birthday.
The tour was long—about a year and a half, all told—and its goodbye, ongoing even now, a year later, is long too. It’s fitting, though, as there’s a lot to process: While on the road, she released two Taylor’s Version re-recording projects (Red and 1989), launched a super-sized studio album (The Tortured Poets Department), began dating Travis Kelce (now her fiancé), attended two Super Bowls, and wrote and recorded another studio album (The Life of a Showgirl). And those are just the highlights.
Taking the microphone, Swift spoke after the rambunctious cheering of the crowd—made up of her entire backing band and vocalists, the Eras Tour dancers, tour production staff, her dad Scott Swift, mom Andrea Swift, and brother Austin Swift, not to mention various Disney personnel and a few members of the media—faded, thanking all who were involved in the tour and production of the series.
“It was a year ago yesterday that we played the last show of the Eras Tour. It feels insane. I know it does for me,” she said, before describing a career-long fixation with not just entertaining people, but providing an escape for audiences, where everything is not perfect, but all feelings are allowed. There’s room for the joy and community that fans have gushed over finding at her concerts, right alongside space to express grief with songs like “Marjorie,” rage (“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”), exasperation (“We Are Never Getting Back Together”), resilience (“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”), giddy youthfulness (“22”), and more points along the emotional spectrum that colors everyday life.
“Everything that went into this was all the lessons we’ve learned all of our lives,” she said, crediting her dancers, band, technical staff, and all involved with pouring their own life experiences into making the tour an immersive experience, before acknowledging the docuseries’ directors, Don Argott and Sheena Joyce, also in attendance, for their work preserving the period to share with the world.
