10 of 19 | Taylor Swift had Lumen Field shaking with her Eras Tour Saturday night in Sodo. (Luke Johnson / The Seattle Times)

By 
Michael Rietmulder 
Seattle Times music writer

Concert review

Taylor Swift was just getting warmed up. With a little help from a sold-out Saturday night crowd at Lumen Field that came ready to scream every line, Earth’s biggest pop star had just ripped through “Cruel Summer” — a 4-year-old electro-pop banger that’s arguably the song of this summer — when she decided to have a little fun.

Without saying a word, Swift pointed to sections of the Seattle crowd, which she pegged at 72,000, who would erupt like audible geysers on their queen’s command. “This could go to my head,” Swift said playfully. “You just made me feel so powerful, you know what I mean?”

It was a winking setup for a booming “The Man” — a joyful stomp-and-romp rebuke of sexist double standards — that saw Swift bro-ing around a gargantuan office-themed stage, fist-bumping her battalion of business-suited dancers in jest, as her sequined jacket and boots glistened in the fading sunlight.

After Saturday night, Swift has every right to feel powerful. Although Lumen Field reps couldn’t confirm the final attendance figures Sunday morning, it was the largest concert crowd in the venue’s history, breaking a record previously held by U2’s 360 Tour, which drew more than 70,000 fans in 2011. According to Swift’s team, 72,171 fans were in the house Saturday.

Taylor Swift had Lumen Field shaking with her Eras Tour Saturday night in Sodo. (Luke Johnson / The Seattle Times)

From the opening segment of Swift’s Eras Tour, for which there was an almost unprecedented amount of anticipation, Swift came ready to shoot-to-kill-you-with-a-look, as the stadium exploded with the strike of every pose or lick of her bright red lips. The three-and-a-half-hour marathon was barely underway, and it was already clear fans were in store for a night of entertainment on the biggest, grandest scale.

At 33, Swift already has around 15 years of pop stardom under her belt. In that time, she’s developed a reputation for having one of the strongest work ethics and most meticulous eyes for detail in the biz, and her ambitious, career-spanning Eras Tour takes that to another level. It’s customary for artists with catalogs as deep as hers to draw from the different periods of their careers with any tour. But the breadth and depth of the ground Swift covered across her whopping, 40-some-song set — without a proper set break, no less — was truly impressive, both physically and artistically. (Of her 10 albums, only her 2006 debut was omitted.)

Taylor Swift performs Saturday night in Seattle. The superstar musician plays at Lumen Field again on Sunday night. (Luke Johnson / The Seattle Times)

Rather than working through material chronologically, Swift and her band — who flanked the back line of the stage, which had a long catwalk jutting out to the middle of the stadium and a secondary, diamond-shaped stage in the middle — ping-ponged between older and newer stretches of her career, helping the pace of the show.

Breaking out the set into nine or so album-specific segments, each with their own imaginative stage designs and wardrobe changes, only magnified the multitudes of Swift, the country-singer-turned-certified-pop-juggernaut who prompts economic impact studies in every metropolis she visits. Shuffling through the various periods of her career often felt like visitations from the ghosts of Taylors past, from the teenager singing of high-school romance (“Fearless” and “Speak Now”) to the crossover pop star starting to realize her widescreen visions (“Red” and “1989”) and the snake-slaying superstar whose life played out in the tabloids (“Reputation”).

The starkest, most potent juxtaposition came during the first half of the show, when Swift segued from the indie-folk underpinnings of “Folklore” to “Reputation,” with the buzzing synths and crunching trap drums of “Ready For It” making it clear we were out of the woods.

More than 70,000 Swifties gathered at Lumen Field in Seattle on Saturday night, breaking U2’s all-time attendance record at the venue. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour comes back for an encore on… (Luke Johnson / The Seattle Times)More 

With a wealth of newer songs from a prolific four-album run she’d never before toured on (spanning 2019’s “Lover” to last fall’s “Midnights” LP), the star’s abbreviated throwback dives into her transitional “Speak Now” and “Fearless” eras felt particularly fan service-y.

It’s hard to fathom Swift getting more popular than she already was during her last Seattle date, when she brought her popcorn-ready Reputation Tour here in 2018. But kicking off a two-nighter at the same venue five years later, it seemed that for every millennial going “back to high school” with Swift on a gleeful pass through “You Belong With Me,” there was a 7-year-old singing along just as loudly to “Love Story,” the same 2008 seeds bearing yet another generation of Swifties.

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One of Swift’s strengths as a performer is turning some of her less overtly stadium-ready songs into some of the biggest moments in her shows.

Sitting alone at a moss-covered piano, in keeping with the woodsy motif of her “Folklore” and “Evermore” albums, Swift eased in to a heart-leveling “Champagne Problems.” For a minute, there was a rare stillness in the air that the crowd seemed to breathe in, only to let loose in a triumphant choir, joining their leader loudest at the bridge. As the stadium erupted in an extended “Taylor” chant when the final note slipped away, even Swift seemed to well up a little on the big screen.

With each section of the show, the stage transformed into distinct mini universes, and for all the more explosive, fire-cannon-blasting moments, those woodsy “Folklore” and “Evermore” portions felt especially Northwest. When Swift later returned atop the mossy-roofed “’Folklore’ cabin,” she joked that the pandemic-conceived “fantasy world” was “in the middle of the woods — somewhere in Washington state, probably.”

Taylor Swift performs Saturday night at Lumen Field, the first date of a two-night Seattle stint on her record-setting Eras Tour. (Luke Johnson / The Seattle Times)

Save for a pair of surprise acoustic songs (Saturday night it was “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” and “Everything Has Changed”), there isn’t a ton of variation in the set list from night to night on the Eras Tour. But with sibling rock trio HAIM joining the tour as one of the openers in Seattle, fans were treated to the debut of the country-rock-tinged “No Body, No Crime” with Swift accompanied by her three “besties” to kick off the “Evermore” portion of the night. Even though her country roots seem a lifetime away, the dark, brooding number is proof Swift can channel an outlaw spirit anytime she wants.

Having executed the most ambitious tour of her career as well as she did Saturday night, it’s fair to wonder if there’s anything left Swift can’t do.