Taylor Swift joyfully caps her epic Eras Tour era

If the first two episodes of The End Of An Era – the documentary series about Taylor Swift’s record-breaking The Eras Tour – were defined by how the American pop star weathered the brutal moments that befell her road show, the final four are marked by her joy.

The last batch of episodes, now all available to stream on Disney+, chart how the 36-year-old rebounded from not one but two heartbreaks and embarked on a relationship with her fiance, Travis Kelce.

Along the way, she recorded yet another album in secret and completed the record-breaking concert extravaganza (March 17, 2023 to Dec 8, 2024).

Though the Kelce details are perhaps the most tantalising, Swift also offers more insight into the complexities and challenges of mounting a tour of that scale.

Here are seven takeaways.

Physical training for the tour was intense

One of the most viral moments from the third episode involves footage of Swift training at the gym to be onstage moving for 3½ hours. “I’ve never worked out this much in my life,” she says. “It’s horrible.”

Six months before her first rehearsal, she started running on the treadmill every day to the tempo of her songs while singing them. Footage also shows her performing crunches and pull-ups, and using battle ropes.

It is all to maintain the illusion of effortlessness, as she tells her trainer, you do not want the audience to see you panting.

Quick changes can be hazardous

One of the most revealing bits comes when cameras delve into the bowels of the stage to demonstrate how Swift changed costumes in under two minutes. She was dragged on what she calls a “pulley system”, unzipping her outfits on the go, and ran upstairs to designated rooms.

During one show, she tripped on the hem of her dress, fell and ripped open her palm. After tearing off the dangling skin, she made her cue for the next era, still bleeding.

Her acoustic sets required on-the-fly planning

The final four episodes show Swift plotting her acoustic interludes, which varied night to night and were the least-rehearsed elements of the show.

Still, the type-A student explains that she would never just wing it, prepping in her dressing room and bouncing ideas off her mother, Andrea.

As Swift devises her complicated medley for the final show in Vancouver, it is Andrea who suggests that she sing “it was the end of an era” in the track Long Live, instead of the usual lyric “it was the end of a decade”.

Swift loves the idea.

Andrea Swift was a matchmaker

In the fourth episode, Andrea recounts how she encouraged her daughter to date Kelce after hearing him talk about the star on his New Heights podcast.

Andrea called up a Kansas City football-loving cousin who promised Kelce was the “nicest guy” who “really loves his mom”.

That was all she needed to start prodding her daughter, despite the fact that Swift had never been into athletes.

“You said something to the effect of, ‘You gotta start doing something different,’” Swift remembers.

Her previous boyfriends are not mentioned by name, but she does discuss how she went through two break-ups on the first half of the tour, adding that Eras was what kept her going.

The Life Of A Showgirl came about during clandestine trips to Sweden

In the penultimate episode, Swift explains that she started jetting to Sweden in between her shows to write her latest album, The Life Of A Showgirl, alongside producers Max Martin and Shellback. They last collaborated with her on Reputation in 2017.

“I was in a place in my life where life felt so full of possibility, and it felt like I was figuring things out,” she says of the desire to work on the LP. As for her hit-making co-workers, she explains she always thought of herself as their apprentice.

Swift had scouts scour the audience for the kid who appeared during her Red set

Each night on The Eras Tour, she gave a young fan her hat during the song 22. In the documentary, she describes how members of her team would scan the audience to find a “kid who knows every single word to the songs and is having the time of their life at this show”.

While she says some of the young fans got shy under the lights, others were living out their mini pop star fantasies. One girl, she remembers, shook her to her core by asking, “Is this real life?”– to which Swift did not have an answer.

The tour was all-consuming

The documentary gives viewers a powerful sense of how hard Swift worked on the Eras experience. “You just don’t have any energy for anything that seems optional,” she says.

Her goal after the tour was to regain the parts of herself she had to cut off while focusing so intensely: “I know I used to have hobbies and, like, a personality.”

The series ends with title cards explaining what she has been up to since it ended, including getting engaged and releasing The Life Of A Showgirl. Of course, we already know. NYTIMES