Taylor Swift in Zurich, 9 July 2024

Yesterday, in the baking heat at Zurich's Letzigrund stadium, we experienced three-plus hours of music and performance by Taylor Swift, her dancers,  her band, and her stage designers. The show was as intense as my previous two benchmarks for pop concerts: Leonard Cohen (Zurich 2008) and Talking Heads (San Francisco 1983). I was particularly struck by how, in part by the powerhouse arrangements and in part by the concert's sheer volume, the selections from the almost ambient recordings on Swift's two 2020 albums, “folklore” and “evermore”, were transformed live into anthems, especially in a moving performance of "marjorie": "What died didn't stay dead, / You're alive, you're alive in my head." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 July 2024)