Taylor Swift @ Acrisure Stadium, Pittsburgh, PA 6-16-23

The biggest tour of the year is currently happening as we speak. Taylor Swift’s The Era’s Tour is simply “thee” thing to be at. If you were lucky enough to get tickets. In fact, there was so much demand when tickets went on sale that thousands of fans came away empty handed. This caused the government to step in and are now trying to correct Ticketmaster business practices (that’s a whole another story that we won’t be able to dive into this review on.) Tickets are being sold for astronomical prices on secondary markets. So to be able to be lucky enough just to get into the stadium and have a chance among a select few to review it, we couldn’t pass up that chance. So we made the trip from Buffalo to Pittsburgh to see what all the buzz was about. This was the 1st night of of two sold out shows at Acrisure Stadium.

When we arrived (a few hours before the doors opened) the streets were already filled with thousands of girls (and women). They were wearing dresses that had more sequins and with the accompaniment of eye crystals that made you reminisce about your high school prom days.

They put a countdown clock on the video screen 2 minutes before the show was about to start. The fans went absolutely nuts. The anticipation was very palpable. As the clock struck zero, one by one, people with these large colorful fans went up and down the thrust. then at one point they all met together in the middle until Swift popped up to start “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince.” The first 6 songs were taken from her 2019 album ‘Lover.’ The theme throughout the show was to play selected tracks off of each one of her albums. Next, she went back to 2008’s ‘Fearless’ and did 3 songs from that disc. Her entire band came down to the edge of the thrust to play “Love Story.” Of course, before starting the next theme of songs for a particular album, there were overall stage changes and then costume changes for Swift. One of my favorite themes was the outdoor scenery for the ‘Evermore’ songs. This included Swifts piano draped in ivy looking décor. Before she sang “Champagne Problems,” Swift looked around and told the audience that the first time she ever played a stadium was right here during a Steelers game. She also talked about why this tour shaped to be the way it was as during the pandemic that they couldn’t tour so they would make and release as much new music as possible. Her snake theme dress for the ‘Reputation’ album was simply radiant. A song highlight for this set was “Look what You Made Me Do.”

For the ‘Speak Now’ album, only one song was played “Enchanted.” Swift sported beautiful princess dress for the song. Reading online I see that it contains 2000,000 sequins and crystals of various shapes and sizes. Truly remarkable!

One of her most popular albums was up next in songs from the ‘Red’ album. The band yet again made their way to the end of the thrust for “22.” Before they made their way back, Swift found a young fan and placed her hat on top of her head for a wonderful keepsake. Another highlight was a 10 minute version of “All Too Well” where she performed with just an acoustic guitar in the middle of the thrust. Her next theme was a log cabin set up for ‘Folklore.’ During the song “August,” the bracelets that were handed out to fans prior to entering went off and flashed red and orange. This went on in various other parts of the set too. ‘1989’ included some of her most fun songs to dance to. This was no more evident than in “Shake It Off.” Her dancers rode around on bicycles during the song.

The surprise of the set is that at every show, Swift plays 2 unexpected numbers; one on acoustic guitar and one on piano. The first was “Mr. Perfectly Fine” that didn’t make it on the original version of ‘Fearless’ and ended up on her re-recorded version of the album. The re-recorded version was released in 2021. This was the 1st time she performed the track live. This may have got the biggest crowd response of the entire night. Next up was “The Last Time’ which she performed on piano and it was the 1st time she has performed that particular track in over 10 years.

She ended her set performing a whopping 6 songs off of the ‘Midnight’ album. It was appropriate to end the set with her most recent work. Highlights were ending the song in “Karma.” That song represents her hard work in trying to own her careers worth of work. She had to redo some of her own music because she couldn’t work out a deal with her first record label for the rights to own it. A subtle and true way to end her show for sure.

The show was over 3 hours and 20 minutes long. 44 songs were played. This was Swift’s first tour in 5 years. Since that time, she released 4 albums that all reached platinum status. It’s almost unheard of in todays age for an artist to move that many units of an album. This is obviously translating well to the ticket sales as I mentioned earlier. There were 73,117 in attendance breaking a record for the most fans attending any single event in the stadiums history. That was just an official count of who walked through the turnstiles. We are not talking about the thousands of fans who were outside signing along to her songs as well. At one point during the show Swift said; “she couldn’t believe the support the fans were given her and that she thought it was insane for this many people to be in one place for any reason.” Well, Taylor, I think it’s obvious why. The songs connect to your fans and their love for you is hard to match in any fanbase. Welcome back to the tour circuit!

Setlist:

Lover album

Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince (shortened)

Cruel Summer

The Man

You Need To Calm Down (shortened)

Lover

The Archer

Fearless album

Fearless (shortened)

You Belong With Me

Love Story