Pop star thrills Paris crowds with songs from newest album The Tortured Poets Department
Taylor Swift has added her newest album, The Tortured Poets Department, to an already packed setlist as she returned to The Eras Tour after a two-month break.
Swift had described TTPD as “new works reflecting events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure”. In Paris on Thursday night she put it more succinctly: “Female rage, the musical.”
The Eras Tour has travelled across the Americas, Asia and Australia. After concerts in 12 European countries – including Spain, Germany, Ireland and Portugal – it will return for a final run in the US and Canada. Swift’s UK concerts begin on 7 June at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium, before moving to Liverpool, Cardiff and London’s Wembley Stadium.
In the first of her European dates, at La Défense arena in Paris, Swift added seven songs from her new 31-track album, including the single Fortnight and I Can Do It with a Broken Heart, which charts the difficulties she experienced touring after a relationship breakdown: “All the pieces of me shatterеd as the crowd was chanting, ‘more’ … I cry a lot, but I am so productive, it’s an art.”
The order of the other Eras featured in her tour also underwent a shake-up, with Red moving up the schedule and the twin 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore combined. Some fan favourite songs such as Tolerate It and Long Live seem to have been dropped from the show.
TTPD has cemented Swift as the biggest pop star this century by many metrics. The album has dominated streaming services globally and tracks from it occupied the top 14 spots on the US Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in the week of release, breaking the record she set with her previous album, Midnights.
Swift’s The Eras Tour, which began in March 2023 and will continue until December this year, is the highest grossing of all time, and the first concert tour to hit $1bn according to live music industry analysts at Pollstar, who predict that Swift could bring in $2bn over the span of the tour.
The Guardian’s Adrian Horton gave a five star review to the opening concert in Glendale, Arizona in March 2023, calling it “an indisputably epic start”. Another five-star review followed for her Australian tour opener, with Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen describing it as “an eye-popping spectacle and completely engrossing”.
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As the tour arrives in Europe, several European cities have already seen a markup in hotel prices, with some hotels selling out of accommodation months in advance.
