Taylor Swift gave fans a behind-the-scenes look into her massively successful Eras Tour with a recent book that featured backstage photos and an in-depth explanation of how the tour came together.
Swift’s The Eras Tour Book was released exclusively in Target on November 29 — Black Friday — and is a 256-page coffee table book that showcases her lengthy, multi-continental tour in detail. The Eras Tour officially kicked off in Arizona in March 2023 and is wrapping up on December 8, 2024, in Vancouver, Canada.
As Swift takes fans through the process of creating the “longest, most ambitious show I’d ever even attempted,” she also noted that she always knew how the Eras Tour concert would start.
With more than 10 studio albums to choose from to start the concert — and an eleventh being added mid-tour — Swift had her massive discography to choose from. But in this book, Swift explains that she always knew she would start the concert with her Lover album. If you haven’t seen Eras Tour live or watched the film, Swift starts her show off with a version of “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince” before going straight into “Cruel Summer” — both from Lover.
“I aways knew the Lover era should open the show, and specifically the line ‘it’s been a long time coming,’” Swift explained in the book. “Because it had been! I’d never gotten to tour the Lover album and so this was a brand new era we were creating.”
Swift released her seventh studio album Lover in August 2019 and was set to go on tour with Lover Fest in July 2020. She postponed the live performances to the next year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but eventually canceled altogether in February 2021.
“I’m so sorry, but I cannot reschedule the shows that we’ve postponed,” Swift said in a statement at the time. “This is an unprecedented pandemic that has changed everyone’s plans and no one knows what the touring landscape is going to look like in the near future.”
Instead of touring, Swift kept busy during the pandemic, releasing Folklore, Evermore, and Midnights. While fans weren’t able to get a dedicated tour to Lover, they did get multiple songs from the album during Eras Tour — including “Cruel Summer,” “The Man,” “You Need to Calm Down,” and “Lover.” Taylor Swift also played multiple songs from the album during her surprise acoustic and piano set.
