We were both young when we first saw you. We close our eyes, and the flashback starts – you’re standing there, on the stage of Singapore’s National Stadium, in our hot summer air. But our eyes open, and reality hits us – Taylor Swift’s internet-breaking The Eras Tour has come to an end. And we are facing withdrawal symptoms. Join us as we relive the wonderland that was The Eras Tour on 2, 3, 4, 7, 8 and 9 March 2024 – the six dates that will forever be etched into the history books as one of the greatest concerts Singapore has ever seen.
The sweet days of waiting for the queen of pop to take the stage at the National Stadium are now nothing but a distant memory. That feeling you get when you remember that you were breathing the same air as Taylor Swift is replaced with an abyss of yearning. The concert venue that throbbed with beats and echoed with heartbreak anthems now stands silent, as if mourning Mother Swift’s departure from our island. A cloud of melancholy looms over Singapore. And reliving our best days happens to be our coping mechanism, so here we go!
The Preparation
Over 330,000 of you from all over Southeast Asia graced these shows dressed in your favourite era (or maybe the funnest to dress up!). Never in my life had I seen so much bling in my life. There was fringe, there was glitter, there were gems (on outfits and around the eyes!) – oh, Singapore, you were truly bejeweled!
Strutting the pavements leading out of Stadium MRT station, against the tiles of Kallang Leisure Park and the concrete leading into the stadium were cowboy boots of all shapes, colours and sizes. Taylor Swift summoned an era of fashion that the world had forgotten all about! My TikTok for you page and Instagram stories were flooded with make-up and outfit transformations of everyone attending the show, and each and every single one of you nailed it!
But the frenzy that had driven all of us crazy was the whole bag fiasco. The security check before entering the venue had a very explicit set of rules for the bags that we were allowed and not allowed to bring – only bags with a maximum of two compartments were allowed, chained bags were not allowed, and more crazy things that seemed to be new just for this show.
I’ve even heard of people being forced to throw away their foldable umbrellas, rendering them weaponless to the unpredictable forces of nature. I heard of this and left my trusty companion at home. But the rain must have wanted to give Taylor the true Singapore welcome, and it poured relentlessly on Day 4. I was defenceless and had no shelter, so I was drenched as I dashed from the MRT station to the security check. The ‘no umbrellas’ rule in a climate like Singapore’s was ridiculous, and many of us had to pay the price.
But the biggest part of preparing for The Eras Tour was, hands down, the bracelet-making. It was a rite of passage for everyone attending the shows. The lore of Taylor Swift once again takes our breath away – the making of friendship bracelets and exchanging them at concerts with other fellow Swifties! There was not a single person in sight without bracelets stacked on their arms. We worked hard, Swifties!
As I made the friendship bracelets, it felt so surreal that the next time I’d wear them would be in the presence of the woman whose music raised me. As I spelt out the different eras while making the bracelets, I’d think back to that time of my life and remember my own era. We all grew up with Taylor, and this little tradition might seem silly to the whole world, but it’s the legacy of Taylor and her Swifties, and I’m so glad that we honour our journeys like that. As I exchanged my bracelets with those around us, we’d hear their stories and bond over the memories we made with Taylor. It was beautiful.
But now what? We made the friendship bracelets. We exchanged them. And now we’ve got a gazillion adorable friendship bracelets lying around. These bracelets are a precious memory, one that stands for our childhoods coming full circle, so do them justice and display them with pride! Put all your bracelets in a glass jar and place a beautiful LED light string in the middle for the bracelets to light up, get a heart-shaped hand sculpture and adorn it with your bracelets, or make a 3D poster by pasting all your bracelets to a poster paper using blu tac and hang it up!
The Show
Six nights. Three hours. 44 songs. 10 eras – Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, Reputation, Lover, Folklore, Evermore, and Midnights. We travelled through 18 years of the queen of pop’s career in just three hours!
Three hours, ladies and gentlemen. While it seems like a tiny amount of time for the magnificent career that Taylor has had, only a few artists do three-hour-long shows because it takes a lot of stamina. But hey! If 18 years of music and performing has done anything, it’s preparing Taylor for this very tour. I was exhausted at the end of it just from screaming my lungs out and jumping up and down, so imagine Taylor singing like the angel she is for six nights! And she never let it show if she wasn’t feeling her best, even with Singapore’s scorching heat.
For the entirety of the three hours, I was entertained. With a gorgeous and thoughtful set, along with the most soulful vocals, the show was a sensory experience. If there’s anything I’ve learned from this show (apart from the realisation that I can indeed scream for three hours straight and survive), it’s that Taylor is truly a performer. Oh, she performed. She gave us the show of a lifetime.
10 eras of Taylor Swift were laced with elements of today’s Taylor. I might be reading too much into it, but Taylor’s shimmering, bejeweled motif in her most recent era, ‘Midnights’, shined throughout her outfits of almost all her eras. Whether it was a stylistic decision or an ingenious tactic to ensure everyone could see her no matter how near or far they sat, it was stunning! Her outfits made her look so ethereal. And each one was the perfect representation of every era. She well and truly ate every look and every era.
I’m a huge ‘Fearless’ and ‘Reputation’ girl. These albums practically shaped my personality and made me the person I am today. Hearing Fearless, You Belong With Me, and Love Story was surreal! And during ‘Reputation’, that transition between Don’t Blame Me and Look What You Made Me Do was goosebump-raising.
Speaking of ‘Reputation’, the part that sent chills down my spine was the magic of the LED bracelets that everyone attending the concert got. During Look What You Made Me Do, the bracelets lit up to make it look like a snake was slithering through the crowd! I lost my mind. Taylor never misses! These light bracelets did their witchery throughout the show. Another example would be during Bejeweled when Taylor sang, “I can still make the whole place shimmer”, and the lights shimmer like diamonds!
Even in the eras that I wasn’t as familiar with, Taylor performed her heart out. I was entertained from the first to the last song. There was never a dull moment with Taylor on stage. I laughed, I screamed, oh, and I definitely cried. When Champagne Problems started playing, all the Little Woman TikTok edits of Laurie proposing to Jo hit me like bullets. Ugh, this song has so many levels.
And not forgetting the sensation of the show that had everyone waiting for his part with bated breath – Taylor Swift’s dancer Kameron Saunders stole the show with his Singlish words during the bridge of We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. During my show, I heard the man himself scream with his whole chest, “Alamak!”. He nailed the pronunciation, the emotion, the feel, and just everything! Sir Kameron, you served, and we’re honoured to have seen it!
Anyway, I went on Day 4 of The Eras Tour on 7 March, and I hate to brag, but we won the surprise song game. We got Death by a Thousand Cuts mashed up with Babe. We got Fifteen. We got You’re on Your Own, Kid! There’s so much to unpack here. Let me collect myself!
I absolutely love Death by a Thousand Cuts. From the album ‘Lover’, it’s one of those songs that you can imagine screaming in a concert with all that passion and anger built up inside of you. It’s the song that awakens your heartbroken side that you hypnotised to sleep forever.
It’s an understatement to call this a heartbreak anthem. When I saw that this wasn’t a part of the setlist, I was disappointed because it’s such a perfect concert song that is bound to get the whole venue screaming and stomping. But Mama Taylor knows best. It’s like she reached into my brain and knew what I wanted.
But more than that, she knew what I needed. A mash-up of Fifteen and You’re on Your Own, Kid? She knew what she was doing!
Fifteen came out when I was literally a child. And when I first heard it, I just couldn’t wait to be 15. I couldn’t wait to grow up. And on 7 March 2024, I listened to this song live for the first time in my life as a 21-year-old adult. That feeling of waiting to turn 15 felt like years ago, but at the same time, where did all the time go? Watching Taylor perform Fifteen in front of me was like witnessing a chapter of my life unfold before me. It felt like a coming of age. I bawled my eyes out. But little did I know what Taylor had in store for us next.
She played You’re on Your Own, Kid. That killed me and brought me back to life. Fifteen represented how I couldn’t wait to grow up. But You’re on Your Own, Kid is a song to the current adult me, weighed down by the woes of adulthood and growing, that everything will be okay.
It’s like Taylor, the woman who created the music that raised me from a wide-eyed child with big hopes and dreams to a young woman on the way to accomplishing them, is telling me that I’m going to be fine. It’s like she was talking to me. It reminded me why I fell for Taylor’s music in the first place. And when Taylor sang, “So make the friendship bracelets”, everyone raised their wrists as if to show her how they’ve honoured her words. I’ll never get a night like this ever again.
The crowd that day was so in love with Taylor that we gave her a 3-minute-long standing ovation! Non-stop applause and endless appreciation for the woman standing before us ensued, and it felt like the National Stadium had been transformed into the Cannes Film Festival, where standing ovations are a festival tradition. Taylor was so awestruck by us that she stood there, shaken up, almost moved to tears. A goosebump-raising standing ovation in the country her mother grew up in – nothing short of an “I made it” moment for this incredible woman.
Well, that was Taylor. But she also had an opening act – pop princess in the making, Sabrina Carpenter! She performed for about 30 minutes (which was very little), but she won us all over. She surely has a personality that shines on the stage as she does her little dancing and sings in her wonderful voice. Another surprise to await every show was Sabrina’s Nonsense outro, which is customised for every night. Her little naughty innuendos got the crowd going wild as she sang:
Told that boy to sit me down on all fours,
Told that boy “go faster”, now I’m all sore,
You hit a little different here, Singapore!
Ugh, Sabrina is such a little cutie. She may be tiny, but she fills the stage with her amazing energy and marvellous voice. Oh, and her slow rendition of Dancing Queen by the ever-iconic ABBA was something I’ll never forget. Why did it kind of make me emotional? From a Disney girl to the opening act of Taylor Swift, Sabrina, you were a sight for the eyes and a treat for the ears! We love you!
As spectacular as the show was, I’d change some things if I had the power to. Firstly, the god-forsaken sound system. National Stadium’s sound system has a bad reputation for its muffled sound, making it hard to understand what Taylor was saying sometimes. This is not a new problem; every other concert I’ve experienced at the National Stadium has had this issue. If Singapore is the only Southeast Asian stop on this tour with over 330,000 attendees worldwide, the least I’d expect is upgrading the sound system. But maybe that’s just me!
Also, the venue was steaming hot. Combined with the unbearable heat of our climate, the torturous humidity, and the body heat from screaming and jumping for three straight hours, I was sweating enough to fill dams. By the end of the night, it was not a pretty sight, and the gems around my eyes had melted off. I don’t know much about science, but I wish something could be done to improve the ventilation in the stadium to make it less stuffy and also a safer concert experience.
That no-umbrella rule was also beyond me. Those few days were the rainy season, and the rain certainly made its presence known. Many of us were caught in the rain and drenched by the time we made it in. Moreover, ponchos were allowed, but many people brought disposable ones that they just discarded on the ground after use. The inventor of dustbins is quaking as we speak.
First of all, the environment is giving you a major side-eye for using disposable ponchos instead of reusable ones, and on top of that, not even throwing them away properly. Swifties, that was nasty. The ground was littered with ponchos that we had to evade like landmines on top of the extremely slippery floor due to the rain. Bad move, guys! Let’s be mindful of our surroundings in and out of the venue.
The Impact
Everything aside, Taylor Swift performing in Singapore is crazier than you think. Let’s dig deep.
When we saw that the Singapore Tourism Board was one of the official partners for the Singapore stop of The Eras Tour, we all put on our thinking caps and channelled our inner Sherlock Holmes. When we saw that Singapore was the only stop in Southeast Asia and one of two stops in Asia, everything clicked. And soon, news broke that Singapore had “negotiated an arrangement” with Taylor’s team to make Singapore the only stop in Southeast Asia.
This was a masterstroke that meant a beaming lot for Singapore’s economy, tourism, and reputation. According to a Bloomberg survey, Singapore’s gross domestic product (GDP) is projected to increase by 2.9% in the first three months of the year, marking the fastest growth Singapore has seen in six quarters! This is partly thanks to the revenue generated by the influx of tourists that flew in for The Eras Tour. Analysts also say that there will be about a S$500 million boost to our economy. I’m no Math expert (trust me), but that sounds like a lot of money.
But more than money, this tour has sort of put Singapore on the map. I mean, it already was, but hear me out! Over the six nights that Taylor was performing on our sunny shores, the whole world had their eyes on her, which means they had their eyes on us.
Posts and stories about Taylor performing, being spotted out and about, celebrities like her footballer boyfriend, Travis Kelce, and K-Pop stars SHINee’s Minho and BLACKPINK’s Lisa attending her shows had taken over social media. Singapore was on everyone’s lips and everyone’s screens. Not to forget the gazillion videos made by content creators and articles by editorials around the world about Singapore and the National Stadium to familiarise their audience with our country well before Taylor even landed in Singapore.
Taylor Swift has proven that her impact is no less than that of a queen. The world is wild for her, and her run at Singapore’s National Stadium proved it!
Lately, Singapore has been part of rosters for A-list artists on their world tours. But Singapore isn’t just part of the roster; it’s one of the more exclusive cities that makes fans worldwide jealous of more or more exclusive shows. For example, Coldplay performed in the most number of cities in Asia, but with six whole sold-out nights in Singapore in January 2024! Ed Sheeran performed one sold-out night at the National Stadium and did another more intimate show (also sold out) at the Capitol Theatre on his birthday!
All this continues to shine the spotlight on Singapore and (hopefully!) could bring even more of our favourite artists to our stages. You never know! More Taylor Swift wouldn’t hurt as well.
Ending Thoughts
Ironically, I’m at a loss for words. Every song was a smash. The setlist was immaculate. The surprise songs were jaw-dropping. I was singing in the crowds. And when I wasn’t singing, I was screaming my head off. How I got out of there with my vocal cords intact is a mystery and one of the great wonders of the human body.
Taylor Swift is not called the queen of pop for nothing. She delivered six astounding shows with incredible stamina and vocals that will melt your ears in the most beautiful way. It’s easily one of the best shows I’ve ever experienced. That ticketing bloodbath and getting drenched in the rain was all worth it. The wait was worth it. Everything was worth it.
Taylor, you healed our inner child, and you brought our childhood a full circle.
We were enchanted to meet you.
If you’re still not over Taylor-mania, we have more in store for you on our socials! Make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok so that you don’t miss out.
Photos from Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra by Danish Lukawski, Brandon Neo, and Evan Simwandhi of the DANAMIC Team.
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