We should have known the world was about to fundamentally change when Taylor Swift announced her Lover Fest tour in 2019. When news broke that she’d be touring to support her recent album Lover, she announced only five dates in the U.S.—an unusual circumstance given she toured globally for her previous albums, usually making a ton of stops in the U.S. At the time, she said the limited tour was due to her mother’s ongoing cancer condition and treatment. I was dismayed to see that the two Lover Fest East dates were scheduled for summer 2020, both at Gillette Stadium, a bit of a hike from New Jersey. I was resigned to breaking my streak of seeing Taylor Swift on every tour since Fearless, and moving on with my life.

But then March 2020 rolled around and well, you know how that went. Lover Fest was rescheduled indefinitely and then canceled.

I mention this bit of history because The Eras tour is Taylor Swift’s first string of live performances since the reputation tour in 2018. That means Taylor Swift has released exactly six albums since 2018: Lover, folklore, evermore, Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Red (Taylor’s Version), and Midnights. When folklore and evermore were released, I fantasized about seeing Taylor in an intimate, small-scale venue, like The Bluebird Café in Nashville, which would be an appropriate environment for the vibe of those two albums. At the same time, this gave me anxiety thinking about the availability of tickets for such a setting. But then she released three more albums – all without a tour to back each – and I then wondered what she would do with her recent material, all the while confident that the resulting tour would be spectacular.

Mastermind that she is, Taylor Swift conceived The Eras tour: a sprawling, three plus hours event, where she spans all of her albums (except her debut, at least in the core set list) in a 44-song extravaganza. There’s a bit of push and pull with the idea of “eras” when it comes to Taylor Swift’s albums, and it doesn’t surprise me that she’s taken a concept spun by her fans and the media and embraced it as her own. I touched on this in my review of Midnights, but, with each album, there’s a new turn of Taylor Swift’s aesthetic. Fearless gave us wavy hair and a sparkly guitar, with a country feel. Red was all about a vibrant pop of her lip color, straight hair, and ultra-skinny jeans, with a genre-spanning vibe. With folklore and evermore – where the idea of hygge is manifest reality – we saw her in shapeless garments and a natural hairdo. As a result of these distinct aesthetics, iconic visual metaphors, and shape-shifting genre hopping, her fans and the media have come to regard a Taylor Swift album release as something more than a new set of songs to burn through, but rather a defined “era,” like the way we think of the Mesozoic Era being when dinosaurs roamed.

It’s evident to me Taylor designed The Eras tour experience to center on her fans. Throughout the show, she sprinkles in a lot of fan-talk, speaking directly to you individually like you’re age-old friends. It’s worth noting that I was seven rows away from the stage and often felt like she was singing directly to me – total swoon. But the songs she’s selected for her set list and the imagery, costumes, and choreography all center on the iconography her fans have built their alter to Taylor Swift around. The show takes you through her album eras – not in chronological order – and begins with Lover. The opening act, “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” is an abbreviated version of the song, and probably forgettable judging by the vast number of videos online for the second song of the night, “Cruel Summer.” Knowing her fans have come to regard “Cruel Summer” as demonstrating her masterful ability to deliver a compelling bridge, she pauses after the second turn of the chorus to invite the audience – some 70,000 people, every night – to “cross the bridge” with her, and not just sing it, but “scream it.” I’ve seen videos of the “Cruel Summer” bridge so many times my two-year old daughter can now sing it in its entirety. Truly iconic.

While she spends a different amount of time on each era, she highlights the songs that may be most representative of each one, through her fans’ eyes, rather than focusing only on the singles. I’ve heard some mumblings online about Taylor giving short shrift to Speak Now, since “Enchanted” is the lone track she sings, but we should expect her to pick more surprise songs from Speak Now going forward, especially once Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) has launched (won’t those fans be in for a treat when she pulls a SN TV vault track into the show). She makes a point of wedging in “Love Story,” a song she’s played consistently since the Fearless tour. It is also interesting to me that I’ve heard her play “I Knew You Were Trouble” on every tour since Red came out, and lucky duck that I am, I’ve also seen her play “Clean” on piano on every tour since 1989.

Let’s pause on “Clean.” The two surprise songs for my show were “Welcome to New York” on guitar – further reinforcing the confusion of where the home of the New York Giants and Jets actually is – and “Clean” on piano. The sprightly, upbeat, and definitely cute rendition of “Welcome to New York” put a smile on everyone’s face. But it was “Clean” that quieted the crowd, given how profound the performance was. In 2014, Ingrid Michaelson covered “Clean” on piano at the Billboard Woman of the Year Awards, and it was an eye-opening experience, imbuing so much more emotional weight into the song than the album track where production figured heavily in the overall sound impact. Taylor was in the audience, and surely she was taking notes. I imagine Taylor may have written “Clean” on piano, as the song is certainly designed for the instrument. At The Eras show, Taylor brought flourish into the chorus, with the undulating piano playing – not too heavy-handed, just right – creating space for the emotional impact of the song, promoting a sublime aural experience.

Although I was all smiles, ear to ear, for the entire three plus hours, “Blank Space” was probably my favorite performance. (Can we just recall for a second how brilliant this song is? She took the media narrative about her and turned it around into an incredible pop track that’s unforgettable and seared into Millennials’ brains. I wouldn’t be surprised if “Blank Space” is what ultimately differentiated her from her peers, given that she snagged a second Album of the Year award for 1989.) Here she pulls in the iconic golf club from the absurdist, hilarious, and totally perfect video for the song, once again dropping a visual metaphor her fans to recognize and appreciate. As far as I can tell, there’s been little discussion of the incredible choreography on The Eras tour, including Taylor’s moves, and it needs to be said that it’s perfect throughout the show. For “Blank Space,” Taylor stood on the elevated platform in the center of her football-field length stage and performed choreography. What was so amazing to me was what was happening at the same time: the elevated platform featured screens on its sides, with six “Taylors” wearing different outfits doing the same exact choreography, in sync, as what she was performing live on stage. The level of coordination and attention to detail – as well as the experience she’s able to offer her fans, even those with nose-bleed seats – was stunning and affecting.

In a similar vein, the visual cues from folklore and evermore were embedded in the set design, costume (she had that hygge free-flowing dress situation going on), and choreography. She even brought back that house she used for an awards show performance several years ago when she did a “cardigan” and “willow” mash up. In the reputation era set, she donned a leather cat suit — communicating severity, which aligns with the public perception of the album (although it’s actually a love letter to Joe) — and used set elements from the “Look What You Made Me Do” video onstage, such as jail cells with a representative from each Taylor era (now updated to include the albums since reputation came out).

Knowing Taylor had performed two three-hour shows that weekend, I wasn’t expecting her vocals to sustain the marathon-like experience of the show I attended. However, it’s evident Taylor has done significant work on her vocal stamina and pitch. Even though I was attending the third night in New Jersey, she was perfect. Her pitch was precise, even when the notes were out of her comfort range. You may have noticed that, since folklore, many of Taylor’s latest songs are written in a middle range and don’t stray much higher, with a few exceptions like “Labyrinth” off Midnights (an important note is she didn’t cover this on The Eras tour and I expect she’d never play it live). Any songs that took her beyond her bread-and-butter range were supplemented with back up vocals, which felt pretty seamless to me.

The experience of The Eras tour was one I’ll never forget. It was far and away the best live performance I’ve ever seen. Something we all know is that, although The Eras tour may seem superlative and the apex of her career, she’ll come up with something even better next time. She always does.