Early on in her three-hour show on Friday, Taylor Swift reminisced about the first time she sang at Ford Field in Detroit: a Lions game on Thanksgiving in 2006 where she sang the national anthem.
“I was 16 years old, and it was like the biggest place I had ever seen in my life,” Swift said. “I was absolutely losing it. So nervous, freaking out. And now, we’re back on The Eras Tour.”
Like Swift, I’m captivated by the idea of returning to a place and recognizing all the ways that I have changed. I have been to Ford Field three times, all in the last seven months: twice in a five-day span to cover the Buffalo Bills, and again Friday, to see Swift’s first of two back-to-back Detroit concerts.
I could tell you I haven’t changed much since November 2022, but that would be a lie. And I have changed plenty since 2006, when I first started listening to Swift and when she first took that field.
Five days before my first trip to Ford Field in November, my best friend Lily defeated every challenge Ticketmaster threw at her and got four tickets to see Taylor Swift in Detroit.
The Eras Tour is Swift’s first since 2018. Since then, she’s released four new albums, along with two re-records. Her current tour gives her a chance to introduce those “new members of the family” to a live audience.
What I have loved the last few years has been the collective listening of each new album, even if physically, I was often very much isolated. Listening to “Folklore” in a too-bright office of a still-barren apartment that I had moved to less than three weeks earlier, my first time living without roommates. Listening to “Evermore” on a green velvet couch in that Phoenix apartment, my 6-month-old kitten asleep by the start of “Champagne Problems.” Listening to “Red (Taylor’s Version)” on the same green couch, this time in Buffalo, still feeling unmoored just a few months after a cross-country move, and still feeling shredded by “All Too…
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