The Eras Tour is well on its way to crossing the one billion dollar threshold. However, money isn’t the only motivating factor behind Taylor Swift’s robust international show. During her concert at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on Thursday, August 3, Swift confessed that performing live is a coping mechanism she uses to “process life” and a method to bond with fans.
After the COVID-19 pandemic halted touring, Swift has said they put all her attention on recording. According to Variety journalist Chris Willman, she told concertgoers she decided to drop “As many albums as humanly possible” to replace the loss of direct contact with her fans that she’d temporarily lost.
“The reason we didn’t tour for five years — that was not a normal or scheduled thing. We had a global pandemic; we had much more important things that we had to worry about,” said Swift.
She continued, “But I’ve been playing shows sort of as a coping mechanism my whole life since I was about 12 years old. I go through this process where I feel things, write a song about that thing, show it to you, and go, ‘Do you like it? Did you ever feel this way too?’ And so when you guys are at a show if you even nod your head or make eye contact with me or sing the words to a song during a show, that validates that emotion and makes me feel like I wasn’t alone in feeling it. It’s sort of my coping process in life — so all of a sudden, that was gone. And so I decided in order to keep that connection going, if I couldn’t play live shows with you, I was going to make and release as many albums as humanly possible.”
The Eras Tour is slated to return for a second North American run in 2024 after its Latin American wing concludes.