When the Eras Tour started, in 2023, Swift had been at war with the shadowy entities that owned her recordings—first, the bosses of her former label Big Machine Records, then the mogul Scooter Braun, who bought Big Machine, in 2019. Partially out of spite and partially out of determination to wrest back some control over her music, Swift set out on the quixotic “Taylor’s Version” project, rerecording her classic albums nearly note for note and releasing them through her new home label, Republic Records. In 2025, flush with funds after the tour’s end, Swift finally bought her original masters back from Shamrock Capital, the private-equity firm that had purchased them from Braun.
From one perspective, the Eras Tour was a triumphant celebration of the star’s ability to reclaim her own work. But from another, it was something eerier: a necro-pop spectacle, proof of the exhumed past’s continued dominance over the present. As Tyler Foggatt wrote in this publication, the Eras Tour was “a show fit for a late-career Las Vegas residency.” Fans, Foggatt noted, caught the morbid vibe—as one wrote, “This is what I imagine a farewell concert to be. Like, the last show you do in your life.” When I caught the Eras Tour over live stream, I couldn’t help thinking of a line in a song, by the underappreciated psychedelic-rock band Cotton Mather: “Some can make a career out of just trying to say goodbye.”
The morbidity implicit in the Eras Tour has become explicit in other marquee post-COVID pop tours. The performances on the Weeknd’s mega-selling After Hours til Dawn Tour issue from a ruined post-apocalyptic cityscape; the singer, flanked by red-cloaked dancers reminiscent of imperial guards from “Star Wars,” dons a mask and acts out a vague story line that plays his career loosely in reverse. Katy Perry’s Lifetimes Tour, performed on an infinity-sign-shaped stage, imagined a campier apocalypse: a cyborg version of Perry fights an evil A.I. that is exterminating the world’s butterflies, summoning her classic outfits and set pieces along the way. Unlike Swift, these artists use narrative devices to give some connective tissue to the succession of hits. These devices seem to share a conviction, however vague or coded, that the present is a wasteland bereft of life and color. The only hope for redemption is to borrow vitality from the past.
Maybe future historians will look back on the pop mega-tours of this moment and see obvious COVID symptoms. The pandemic, after all, sliced history definitively into an unknowing before, an interminable during, and a maybe-one-day after. The return to a golden age of normalcy was one of the most powerful pandemic-era fantasies. But COVID’s fingerprint on the Eras era may also be more direct. Ticket prices for the top world tours spiked some fifty per cent between 2019 and 2024, significantly outpacing inflation. By the time venues reopened, touring artists were returning to a market where live shows had become more of an exclusive luxury product than ever before. Perhaps the only way to give fans their money’s worth was to make the cataclysm they’d lived through feel like an epic shared history.
Then again, too much history all at once can give you amnesia. History, the late literary critic Fredric Jameson did not quite say, is what hits you in the head. Overwhelmed fans reported blacking out at the Eras Tour, all memories of the night dumped. (Swift later joked that she was delighted to hear this: “I think we did it!” she said on Travis Kelce’s podcast.) All the more fitting, then, that amnesia is the central theme in Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine Tour, under way this summer. The narrative frame for the tour, Grande’s first since 2019, is a gloomy sci-fi conceit reminiscent of those of Perry’s and the Weeknd’s shows. In a series of video interludes that break up the performance into acts, Grande plays Peaches, a woman who wants to undergo a procedure to erase her painful memories. (Grande has explored this character before, both in music videos and in the 2025 short film “Brighter Days Ahead,” a companion to her 2024 album and a tribute to Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”) Peaches, we gather, is a singer, and we are encouraged to imagine Grande’s live performance as an enactment of Peaches’s memories.
