There are a handful of acts who can sell out stadiums and big arenas nowadays.
Then there’s the special case of Taylor Swift. She is the first act to sell out three consecutive nights at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Sure, the Atlanta venue only opened in 2017. But it does fit 70,000 people.
The math is mind-boggling: Swift in Atlanta alone will draw 210,000 people this weekend, or the equivalent of about a dozen sold-out shows in neighboring State Farm Arena or the population of the city of Rochester, New York. Swift will generate more than $33 million in ticket sales this weekend and is expected to earn close to $600 million over 52 dates this year, attracting more than 3 million acolytes.
What makes Swift tick? Her three-hour, 10-minute, 44-song extravaganza of a show Friday night, the first of three, provided plenty of reasons why. At age 33, the Pennsylvania native has been in the public spotlight for more than half her life, a songwriting prodigy who has built her career channeling her own experiences into a catalog of 229 tunes that exceed the quality or quantity of artists twice her age.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
This is her sixth solo headlining tour of her career, each bigger than one before. Her 2020 Lover tour was nixed due to the pandemic, so Swift, since performing two sold-out dates at Mercedes-Benz in 2018, has released a whopping four studio albums since she last came on stage.
And that doesn’t include her re-recording two albums in response to record exec and former Atlantan Scooter Braun scooping up the rights to her first six albums. She thanked her fans for supporting what she thought would be a mere “vanity project” by purchasing the new versions of “Red” and “Fearless” en masse.
So she had no shortage of new material to choose from, plucking 26 from those new albums, representing more than half the concert.
Swift broke up the show into 10 discreet sections, nine of which represented a different album. (She only skipped her self-named 2006 debut, meaning no “Tim McGraw” or “Teardrops on My Guitar.”)
And given Swift’s penchant for perfectionism, it was clear her every choreographed dance move, her every hair flick, her every vocal murmur had been rehearsed a thousand times over. Now a third of the way through her tour, if she made any major gaffes, it wasn’t readily apparent to the untrained eye. Her band, placed quietly on both sides of the stage but occasionally given room to roam, replicated her songs with military precision.
None of that is to take away from Swift’s base level humanity and authenticity. That is her fundamental appeal and even in a large stadium, her ability to make her songs feel intimate and relatable is one of her many superpowers.
For her fanbase, there is no difference between her radio hits and the rest of the album. Her lyrical prowess means her songs are absorbed like valuable nuggets of insight, salves for people seeking a connection with a musician who knows them.
So it’s not at all surprising that hardcore Swifties sung along to every word, from the obvious (”We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “Love Story”) to the “Folklore” deep cuts. They provided Swift ample vocal support that echoed throughout the arena. In fact, she could have shut off her mic and they would have happily filled in the blanks. (Interestingly, she chose not to partake in the concert trope of throwing her mic out to the crowd during key parts of songs.)
The stage design featured a monstrous screen, 150 feet across and 60 feet high. It would sometimes feature closeups of Swift for those in the relative cheap seats. But it also provided a backdrop for many of her songs, evoking the house from the “Lover” video or a King Kong-sized Swift flicking at helicopters in an urban motif during a rendition of her recent No. 1 hit “Anti-Hero.”
There were set pieces that would be the envy of any Broadway production. She traipsed across a multistory scaffolding for “The Man.” During her hypnotically sardonic “Look What You Made Me Do,” her dancers were placed in boxes evoking the video of the same name. While crooning “The 1,” she luxuriated on top of an A-frame in a fantasy forest she created during the pandemic.
The ginormous stage extended far across the floor, giving even those far the video screen closer looks of Swift at different points of the concert. There was a point where four of her backup singers came out in glow-in-the-dark bikes with enough room to get a minor workout. (She notably sacrificed hundreds of potential seats for that stage.)
The audience, not surprisingly, was heavily female, mostly under the age of 40, nearly everyone dressed in some way to pay homage to Swift, typically replicating a favorite look of hers from a past music video.
And for those who may already know every detail of the concert from watching YouTube videos, she sets aside a moment each night to try out two songs that are not on the normal setlist, which she told the crowd was also a way to keep herself sharp.
On this particular night, she first chose “The Other Side of the Door” from her second album “Fearless.” Fans squealed when she mentioned it and their rapt reaction somehow surprised Swift, who after concluding the song said, “Oh my God, you know this one! That made me so happy. You have no idea.”
For her second offering, she moved to the piano and performed her live debut of “Coney Island,” a meditative song she sang with The National off “Evermore.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Despite the Springsteenian length of the concert, virtually nobody left early, the crowd only leaving their assigned spots when the lights came up at 11:10 p.m. And despite the de rigueur blasts of fire and two rounds of confetti, Swift dispensed with one concert cliché: the encore.
She didn’t even end with a hit single. She chose “Karma,” the seventh of a run of tunes from her most recent album, “Midnights.” The upbeat song worked, given that she just broke up with British actor Joe Alwyn after five years.
The chorus: “Karma is my boyfriend / Karma is a god.”
[UPDATE: Swift’s record company released “Karma” as a single on Monday, May 1, three days after this concert.]
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: Rodney Ho
Credit: Rodney Ho
Credit: Rodney Ho
Credit: Rodney Ho
Credit: Rodney Ho
Credit: Rodney Ho
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