I Don't Know How It Gets Better Than This

You take my hand and drag me head first/ Fearless

I promise I'll return soon to regular non-Taylor content… just not yet.

This week has been a rollercoaster. As a reminder - last Wednesday evening I sat in my Vienna hotel room watching the news break that the concert I’d looked forward to for a year wasn’t going to happen. With so few European dates left on the Eras Tour, and fierce competition for tickets, I set to work on accepting that I just wasn’t going to see the show.

And then, this Wednesday, I had a message that a friend of a friend was willing to pass on their nosebleed seats at Wembley on Saturday night for face value, having heard how gutted I was and having themself already seen the concert earlier in the tour.

I feel extremely lucky, and - even after having been to the concert - I still can’t quite believe it. I grew up relatively close to Wembley. Every trip into London on the train from my hometown goes through Wembley Stadium station, but until this week I’d never been inside the stadium. What an occasion to go to Wembley for the very first time!

Obviously, I had some mixed feelings as I got ready for the concert. There still hasn’t been any acknowledgement of last week’s events, no post-concert merch email, no carefully worded statement of sadness on the Taylor Nation social media pages; it’s as if Vienna never happened. But I couldn’t have felt safer as I got ready - the team at Wembley are so used to dealing with super-high-profile events and, since the men’s European football final back in 2021, the security presence on the ground was extremely visible.

Once inside, though… it was everything I hoped for. The atmosphere was celebratory, festive, and safe (Hayley Williams paused the Paramore opener at one point while someone got help, and I saw the stadium medical team whisk into action to help someone in front standing too), and we sang our little hearts out. All 92,000 of us. (Also, cute touch from the stadium catering - chicken tenders with seemingly ranch in one of the food concession stands).

I went into the concert knowing that Taylor Swift is one of our generation’s hardest-working, most talented artists - but what I didn’t know is how good a show she puts on. Sure, I’d seen the film of the Eras tour (most recently, last Friday), but there’s watching a recording that was made halfway around the world and there’s feeling it in the room. Despite the fact that she’s been doing the show (with a couple of changes) since last Spring, and this was the third time this week at Wembley Stadium… she made mfeel like we were there for a one-off celebration.

This may happen at every show, but after Champagne Problems (the spiritual sequel to All Too Well? I think so), there was a multi-minute roaring standard ovation. I had Loop earplugs* (ad - Amazon affiliate link) in for most of the show but I took them out just for a few seconds and felt a wall of sound from the crowd.

Throughout the show, there were moments which made me tear up. Marjorie, a song dedicated to and about Swift’s grandmother, is a song I have a deep connection with; one of my aims for life is that, if my grandmothers were alive, they would be proud of me. So add to that the emotional rollercoaster of getting to the concert at all, and 92,000 people waving their phone torches in the air…

Never be so kind, you forget to be clever,
Never be so clever, you forget to be kind…
Never be so polite, you forget your power
Never wield such power, you forget to be polite…

There are worse messages for how to live, even if I can’t sit down with my grandmothers and ask them how to be.

The Tortured Poets Department set (or Female Rage, The Musical) was especially incredible - if I wasn’t already in love with that album I would be now. Anthems for anxious oldest daughters everywhere. On top of that, it’s a fantastic example of the sheer stagecraft of the tour. Taylor used every inch of her enormous stage and every sinew of her dancers’ muscles to tell the stories in that album.

And then Midnights. I love the choice of Karma to end the show. Taylor gets criticism for all her songs being about falling into and out of love, and for being so publicly in love with Travis Kelce despite her ‘strong independent woman’ vibe. I sympathise with her - as an ambitious, smart woman (though of course not in the same universe as Taylor!) who really, really, wants someone to share my life with, I find her music about the trials and tribulations of that search extremely relatable. But it’s not the main theme of the show. The main theme, for me, is told in the arc between The Man right at the start, Ready For It in the middle, and Karma at the end - we are going to do our best for the world, and we’re going to have a damn good time doing it. Even Fearless isn’t - to my mind - about falling in love, not really. It’s about dressing up and having a great time, one to remember for the rest of our lives.

Taylor, thank you for throwing us such a fantastic party. We may have left glitter on the floor, but you’ve left your lyrics imprinted even more indelibly in our hearts than they already were.

Speak soon,

Lily

Missed Friday’s recommendations post?