Taylor Swift’s Final Night of Eras Tour Is a Quintessential ‘Long Live’ Moment in Pop History’s Greatest Road Show: Concert Review

Chris Willman
·7-min read

The final night of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Sunday night in Vancouver was marked by no big announcements, no guests, no gimmicks, no frills — unless, of course, you take into account that this was the frilliest tour of all time, and that every night on the 149-concert road show felt as spectacular as any actual grand finale could. That this really was it was almost incalculable, perhaps most of all to Swift, who started by saying “we are about to go on one last grand adventure together” and ended by finally thanking “every one of you for being part of the most thrilling chapter of my entire life to date — my beloved Eras Tour.”

Her band had never vamped so long at the end of the closing “Karma” as it did Sunday, as Swift did her best to stretch her arms to include her entire coterie of dancers and singers in a group hug that seemed like it might add several extra minutes to the already three-hour-20-minute show, before going on to hug most of them individually. But the true emotional climax on the third and final night of a BC Place stand might have come earlier, during the “secret songs” segment, when Swift veritably wrapped her arms around the audience by making them part of a mashup centered around “Long Live,” her salute to tours that actually last forever in memory — a fairly ancient song that she turned into an anthem just for the occasion, by changing the “end of a decade” line to “end of an era,” which brought down the house and threatened to become one of those Richter-scale moments the tour has become famous for.

More from Variety

Swift said that she’d “had so long to prepare for the end of this tour,” and was” trying to think about what songs really encapsulate how I feel about tonight, so I decided to go back to the beginning.” That turned out to be a reprise of one of her very earliest, most innocent-sounding, “just a girl” songs, “A Place in This World,” which was mashed up with “New Romantics,” one of her most knowing songs — a four-minute encapsulation of youthful naivete and lovingly cynical maturity that made not just the tour but her entire life feel like one unbroken era, however much she’d broken it all up for the thematic purposes of the tour. As represented by one simple medley, it’s one hell of a continuum.

Then “Long Live” gave way to “New Years Day,” which gave way to just the briefest snippet of “The Manuscript.” The rest of that latter-day song — from her still-currently-No. 1 album “The Tortured Poets Department” — wasn’t necessarily relevant. She picked “The Manuscript” out, clearly, for its closing line: “The story isn’t mine anymore.” It’s a shared story, she was saying, and it cemented the idea of Swift — who enjoys the greatest cult of personality of the modern age — as, conversely, the world’s most effective community leader.

But she was not about to wallow in sentiment beyond what those songs already said about history and closure. The spirit of the night might have been most effectively felt in the hilariously terse statement that came not from her, but dancer Kameron Saunders, in the moment during “We Are Never Getting Back Together” when the mic is passed to him and he blurts out something apropos to the locality. On this night, instead of “Like, ever,” he bellowed, “For the last time, no!,” and it was the laugh line of the night.

Swift resisted to add too many “last time” moments … even though this is a woman who wrote a song called “The Last Time” in commemoration of all the last times that happen every year and every day. “It’s crazy,” she said, that she was singing “the last song I’ll ever sing in the ‘Folklore’ cabin.” (Would it be too much of a fire hazard for the Smithsonian to install it, smokey chimney and all?)

Swifties find ways to have their own ownership over individual shows, and so fan groups had formed online to dream up group efforts for the final show — one of which was singing “Happy Birthday” (she was five days away from turning 35) during the minutes-long pause for applause that typically follows “Champagne Problems.” But the loveliest moment of the night might have come during “Willow,” when hundreds of crowd members held up illuminated orange or yellow balloons, roughly echoing the production design that has Swift’s berobed coven of dancers cavorting with glowing orbs during that lilting “Evermore” number. (It was an even better special effect that the planned one that had glowing wristbands turning parts of the loge sections into heart shapes during “Lover.”)

It was like a fire sale on friendship bracelets — production line upon production line coming to the end of the line for 60,000 fans, many of whom had already seen multiple shows. Vancouver had turned itself into “Swfit-couver” for the closing occasion — not a genius pun, but you take what you can get — with installations of 13 huge signs commemorating song titles placed around the city. But the coup de gras on the final night might been the sight of policemen on horses that were adorned by giant friendship bracelets around their necks.

Memory has always been a theme of the show, and of Swift’s whole canon, generally — the thought of obsolescence, planned (“I’ll bet these memories follow you around” in “Wildest Dream”) or otherwise. In the opening “Lover” segment, Swift gave what amounts to her standard stump speech, making the claim that while these songs had been attached to specific user memories up to this point, from now on, they would always remind attendees of this particular night in this particular stadium. It’s a bold claim to have made each night, but in prefacing the greatest superstar pop tour in history, an objectively accurate one — these indelible images will certainly follow everyone for the rest of their lives (save for maybe the 3-year-olds following asleep on shoulders as the show passed the three-hour mark).

Raising the question: Can a concert be nostalgic for… itself, experienced and remembered all at the same time? In Swift’s mastermindful world, yes.

One other thing made this last trio of shows different from those that immediately preceded them: the presence of extra cameras and — particularly during the “Tortured Poets Department” section that was added only this past spring — even cameramen on stage at times. Fan speculation has run rampant that Swift was having these last three shows filmed for a documentary, although the obvious emphasis on filming “Tortured Poets” material also lent itself to the idea that maybe she wants to put out a special edition of the previously released “Eras Tour” film to include this wealth of new material most U.S. tourgoers never got to see.

The placement of the “Tortured Poets” addition is just right in this amended version of the show, coming right before the secret songs — which, if this were a Broadway show, would be the 11:00 number each night (and literally is, depending on set start times) — and not supplanting the closing “Midnights” section. Although it no longer counts as the latest material, the “Midnights” songs still make for a great closer, with even the more lyrically anxious songs succumbing to an R&B-electro-dance-pop feel that gives the whole closing section of the show the feel of a victory lap for the mutually exhausted performers and audience.

And pop music, like sports, benefits from substitutions. As she often has on the tour, Swift changed the “Karma” line about the guy on the screen to one about the guy on the Chiefs. (She usually only did that on nights where her beau was in attendance, but did it Sunday perhaps for the benefit of the cameras.) Flight trackers shared by fans showed that Swift’s plane was on its way to Kansas City within an hour of the show closing, maybe indicating just how swiftly the performers plans to go into homebody mode, at least for a minute, after more than a year and a half of itinerancy. If so, she’s earned it, along with the $2 billion in grosses.

Best of Variety

Sign up for Variety's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Latest stories