On Monday we had much-needed rain, quite hard at times -- we couldn't
see the lake from our living room window -- though it was only drizzle
when we walked to the beach and since we had a lot of chores left over
from the weekend, it was all fine. And we watched Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, which was cute, and Miracle Workers,
which was absolute crack. But what I want to talk about is Taylor
Swift. If you're a Swiftie, you should stop reading this because either
you know it already or you don't want to be spoiled before you see her
in California (I assume there will be changes to the show before she
takes it to Europe) and if you're not a Swiftie you should stop reading
it because you won't be interested!
As
I've said elsewhere, we parked mid-morning in one of the lots closer to
T-Mobile Park before the Mariners-Blue Jays crowds arrived, and spent
much of the day along the waterfront surrounded by a mix of Swifties and
baseball fans. We arrived at Lumen Field by way of Pioneer Square,
where we'd had Mod Pizza and gelato and traded friendship bracelets with
people in a wide variety of Eras outfits. We traded some more in line
waiting to get inside the stadium, which took a while but was better
organized than the Mariners were a week earlier. It was very warm and
sunny, so we were in no rush to get to our seats and got into the
immense merch line which wrapped around the 300 level and gave us a nice
view of the mountain. I didn't end up buying anything -- I was happy to
keep bracelets as souvenirs.
I have only two complaints about
the evening and one is that they ran out of vegan hot dogs, leaving very
few choices for vegans who didn't want Pizza Hut. We heard Gracie
Abrams while trying to track down the Tex-Mex place, whose lines were
crazy, so I ended up having a Bavarian pretzel with cheese dip for
dinner. Then we went to our seats to hear Haim, who are always great --
they did "Want You Back" and "Gasoline" -- wearing sunglasses because
the sun was still over the stadium in a blindingly bright sky. It
finally started to drop during the set change, when a "Bejeweled"
interview with both Haim and Taylor was showing, and finally the
Midnights clock appeared a few minutes earlier than we expected, before 8
p.m.
I should probably insert my history as a Taylor fan here.
I've always been older than her main demographic and my kids weren't
interested in her, so I was casually acquainted with her radio hits from
her late country era and impressed enough to have bought all her albums
from Red forward, but I wouldn't have said I was invested in her
career and I knew little about her life (I read about who she was
dating because I looked at news about Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom
Hiddleston, not because I looked at news about her). Because potentially
closeted celebrities and how they navigate the media are topics that
interest me, I was aware of the rumors about her and Karlie Kloss and I
occasionally glanced at the news stories, but I didn't go digging on
Twitter for gossip.
I paid no serious attention to Taylor until Folklore,
which blew me away -- specifically "The Last Great American Dynasty"
which engages with so many songwriting traditions while at the same time
making me question her insistence that this was her first
non-autobiographical album because that song is at least as much about
her as it is about Rebekah Harkness. It made me go back and listen to Reputation and Lover
again -- no one will ever convince me that the latter wasn't intended
as a coming-out album, and sorry but no way is "End Game" about Joe
Alwyn, who didn't have big reputation and was never going to be a big
conversation for anyone but her most die-hard fans, in fact I don't
think that song is about a man at all any more than "Gorgeous" is. Okay,
I'm out now as a Gaylor but I want to make clear that I don't actually
care about Taylor Swift's personal life; it's the queer aesthetic in her
songs and the coded messages that interest me. You could hear a hairpin
drop, indeed.
So, back to the concert. Taylor said that she wrote in her diary after her last visit during the Reputation
tour that Seattle was the best crowd she had ever played for, then she
played the crowd, pointing at sections to shout and wave for her, before
she launched into "The Man" (another coded song). She started with
songs from Lover -- there were evangelical protestors outside the
stadium while we were in line, announcing on a megaphone that we were
all going to hell (Swifties gave them friendship bracelets) -- and
everyone inside screamed "shade never made anybody less gay" loudly
enough for them to hear. Insanely, she played (and danced, and marched
all over the stage) 45 songs, supposedly for an all-time record crowd
for Lumen Field of over 72,000 people, and the energy level was
incredible, even higher than when I saw Paul McCartney, which was not a
performance experience I had believed could be equaled.
All the Fearless
songs were happy, delightful singalongs, some of the first songs I ever
heard by Taylor so they all have many years of happy associations. She
launched Evermore by bringing Haim back to perform "No Body, No
Crime" with her, which nobody knew was going to happen so it was
enormously enjoyable, and the stage visuals for the whole album are just
stunning -- "Willow" in particular, a pagan fire festival that makes me
think of Robin of Sherwood. I really loved seeing the Evermore and Folklore
deep woods in the PNW, which Taylor said probably influenced the
fantasy world she dreamed up during the pandemic for those albums (she
said she wanted to imagine a life where she wasn't a lonely Millennial
covered in cat hair). The Folklore cabin looked very much like the one
from the Grammys and she performed both within and without, though of
course my favorite number wasn't part of the teenage love story -- it
was Taylor meeting and dancing with Rebekah Harkness while the screen
shifted from the woods to the windswept coast.
Reputation
also had fantastic onstage visuals (including Taylor's snake costume)
and it was really fun to sing "Look What You Made Me Do" along with a
huge crowd. We also got some (alleged) Kanye shade in "This is Why We
Can't Have Nice Things" -- one of Taylor's surprise acoustic songs,
which she said she'd never played that way before...there was a LOT of
cackling after the line about forgiveness. (And yes, I know the theory
that "Vigilante Shit" is about Taylor being Team Kim in the
Kardashian-West divorce.) That wasn't a song I was really hoping for as
one of the surprises (I reeeallly wanted "Exile" and am jealous the next
night's crowd, which son's girlfriend was among, got "Message In a
Bottle"), but I appreciate her wanting to explore her entire catalogue
in different ways, and we also got "Everything Has Changed" from Red
without Ed Sheeran, which she seemed concerned might upset people
("There’s not a special guest!") but I think she does the song fine
without him.
Of anything in her pre-Folklore era, "Long
Live" is the song that resonates most for me. I readily admit that this
is partly because of some fandom-related songvids set to it (this is a
Star Trek song and an Avengers song for me, deal with it), but I think
everyone has some middle school or high school experience they can
connect to it whether it's theater camp or chess club. People around me
were crying while they sang along and it's impossible not to be moved by
that. That was the highlight of the show for me, even more than the
confetti and fireworks during "Bejeweled" and "Karma" (after the
super-fun 1989 singalong of huge pop hits and the more complicated, darker Midnights
songs that start the set. I did enjoy the fireworks but the launchers
made it impossible to see the band from our seats in Lumen Field's end
zone, so although they sounded great, I have no sense of how many
musicians were playing on any given song.
I'm sure I left out a
bunch of things, but I've been writing this for two hours so I'll just
mention them later if I think of them! We saved the tabs for our LED
bracelets so they still flash purple when we take the tabs out --
apparently they're programmed to keep the last command from the stadium
after changing color and pattern throughout the concert. It's with my
friendship bracelets, a lovely souvenir. Bottom line, I feel SO lucky
that I managed to get tickets with a minimum of screaming at the
computer during the Ticketmaster disaster, and I'm so glad that my
niece Madeleine, who's always been a much more serious Taylor fan, wanted
to travel up here from L.A. to go to the concert with me!
