Specific Feeling: Touring Your Eras

I just got back from a trip to Portugal and Sweden. My fiancé and I went with two of our friends to Lisbon, and then to Stockholm to see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, because it was literally cheaper to fly to Europe than it was to get tickets in America.

Stockholm was chosen because that’s where we managed to get tickets, but it also so happens that we’d all been there together before. The friends who came on this trip with us, Amanda and Andy, lived in Sweden for four years, and my partner and I went out to visit them there a couple years ago. When I take an international trip, I don’t necessarily expect to ever be back in that place, since time and money are limited and there’s so much of the world to see. But back we were, feeling those strange echoes, walking around the city pointing and saying, “I remember this,” “We were there,” “This is where that happened.”

A perfect setup, really, for the Eras Tour, a three-and-a-half hour exercise in memory, nostalgia, and revisiting past selves. I have a hard time talking about music that means a lot to me, probably because of the whole “dancing about architecture” thing, and also so much has been said already about Taylor, her music, this tour. So this is only sort of about the Eras Tour, and more about trying to excavate what the specific feeling was I had on this trip and during the concert.

I found myself very emotional throughout the show, not always because of the songs themselves, but more so because of the people and times they reminded me of. If you’ve been listening to an artist for a long time, every song is a portal to some memory or other. That’s the genius of this show, the way the structure of it invites you to tour the eras of your own life. 

It’s almost quantum, this feeling. Like actually everything is happening all at once, that every era contains echoes of all the others, and that nothing is truly lost, not completely. 

So many of Taylor Swift’s songs are about memory, remembering things “All Too Well,” reframing old memories with new information (“Invisible String”, “Daylight,” “Holy Ground,” too many to mention), and sometimes, more interestingly, editing future memories of the present while it’s still happening. (“Wildest Dreams”, “Nothing New,” “Long Live”) She did a version of this during the concert, too, saying something to the effect of how these songs held a lot of memories, and she hoped that in the future when we heard them, we would think of tonight.

My friend Andy did something similar on our trip—he would say, while things were still happening, “This is the time that we all did this.” “This is the time that we all drank cherry liquor together in Lisbon,” etc. The present will become the past, but it also contains the future. 

After the concert, we took the train to Uppsala, the town where our friends had lived, where we also visited, and it was more of the same déjà vu, for them even more so than us. But Amanda told me the weirdest thing was that it didn’t feel weird, that it felt as though no time had passed at all. That’s a thing people say about old friends, too. That no matter how much time has passed since you’ve seen one another, you can pick up right where you left off.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how time affects friendship, for the book. There’s a lot of agonizing over not having enough time, grief that life gets busy and we don’t have the long stretches of time to spend with friends that were so abundant when we were young, angst over the endless text-triangulation required to coordinate everyone’s schedules. But there is also this: the way time and distance collapse when we’re together. The way old friends contain traces of all your old eras, and you theirs.

One of the best things about aging, so far, for me, has been the way that people and experiences sometimes come back around unexpectedly. I couldn’t have guessed that I’d be back in this place with these people, hearing songs that reminded me of this and other places, these and other people. I couldn’t have guessed who I’d drift apart from and who I’d find my way back to, again and again. I couldn’t have imagined, when I was younger and I longed for a life in the shape of a steep arrow upward, the pleasures of life curling back in on itself.

One of my favorite books, Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, references this quote that it attributes to the French poet Paul Éluard: “There is another world, but it is in this one.” The other world comes in glimpses, I think, and never stays long. Music lifts the veil, and so do friends.

I’m just realizing that 2/2 newsletters I’ve sent have referenced Stockholm. Only one way to find out if I’ll make it a hat trick.