(SPOILER ALERT: The story reveals key details about the concert)

Tickets to Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” may have been the hardest tickets in history to get, with students even skipping school at the initial release to try and snag tickets. I myself had to spend 7.5 hours in a virtual que  throughout the school day, including during a math test, to get nosebleed seats. But “The Eras Tour” was well worth the fight for tickets.

Swift’s visit to Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta was the sixth city on “The Eras Tour.” My friends and I spent the morning putting together our matching outfits, doing our hair, and applying Eras-themed makeup. The 3-hour show was electrifying and took fans through her emotional, 17-year-long music journey. 

Swift was supposed to go on tour for her album “Lover” released in 2019, but it got canceled due to Covid-19 in 2020 and she has not been on tour since. This tour celebrates her rerecording her first six albums in order to obtain ownership over the songs after rights issues with her past label. To celebrate Swift’s return, fans went all out in song-themed outfits and brought handmade friendship bracelets to hand out to each other, creating a hyper-enthusiastic atmosphere before the show even started.

She opened the concert with a song from “Lover”. The stage lit up with album themed colors — pink, yellow, and blue —  while backup dancers dressed in complex costumes with long capes on the back that mirrored a sunrise sky, the background for the album’s cover. 

Gallery • 5 Photos

Taylor Swift performing "Cruel Summer" from her album "Lover".

This energy was kept up throughout the concert as Swift and her team dressed in themed outfits and decorated the stage to reflect each “era” (album) that she was performing. There was a gold dress and cowgirl boots for “Fearless” and the infamous “Who’s Taylor Swift anyway?” (a lyric from the song “22”) t-shirt for “Red”. These elements assisted in telling the story of her songs, whether they were real experiences she went through or fictional worlds she made up, like in the song “Betty” from the album Folklore, which is about a teenage boy apologizing to a girl he cheated on. 

The concert included other visual elements besides what was seen on stage. Confetti fell from the ceiling and fire shot into the sky when she performed upbeat songs like “Karma” and “Bad Blood.” One of the best visual elements from the concert were the light-up bracelets that were handed out to everyone as they entered the stadium. These bracelets synced to fans’ position in the stadium and lit up with song-related colors and made shapes in the crowd. During the song “Lover,”  for example, the bracelets lit up to make pink hearts in the crowd. 

The most important element, though, was Swift herself. At one point in the concert, her team was having issues with the sound, so she had to stop singing for a few minutes until the problem was resolved. She kept the audience engaged with conversation and jokes. Throughout the concert she would talk to the audience, referring to inside jokes, such as how fans have been keeping track of what “surprise songs” she has been playing for the acoustic section of the concert or telling them how much she missed performing for them. 

The Eras tour does an excellent job at telling the story of Swift’s 17-year long music journey while hyping up the audience.