Taylor Swift Eras Tour

All the old Taylors came to the phone Friday night at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. For the purposes Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, ...

Hearing the clubby thump of the latest single, “Lavender Haze,” kick in as the show enters its tenth and final stretch was a kick, in a pop world where most veteran performers put their new material in the middle of a show, rather than the climax. It’s redolent, actually, of how she ended the last tour with a similarly feisty and unexpected choice, “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” “Karma” seemed like a throwaway to some when “Midnights” first came out, but it holds up as not just kind of a funny eff-you — and her funniest song, which is saying a lot in a catalog that includes “Blank Space” — but also a celebration of the good guys winning. Especially when that’s rumored as the next “Taylor’s Version” edition to be coming, that album made for a strange choice to be underrepresented. It’s really only a handful of the 44 songs that are represented as snippets, or passing parts of mashups, although the attentive will note nips and tucks here and there to smashes like “Style” that ultimately aren’t very consequential. As much delight as there is in hearing a hit as mammoth as “You Belong With Me” or an album track as dramatically indelible as “Don’t Blame Me” again, this tour’s greatest value may be in finally giving an airing to the “Folklore”/”Evermore” nexus of contemplative material, with or without the chimney smoke. I wanted to play one more song from that album, if you have an extra 10 minutes to spare.” And the song that once only showed up in sets in the wild-card spot now took its place as now and probably forever the centerpiece of her set, even if “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” did indeed take a slot that probably could have been filled with enough other mashups to take the song count closer to 50. When “Style” occurs late in the show, you get a backward-tracking shot of Swift and her eight-women-strong girl squad moving in a single line toward the camera, to the suitable-for-marching beat. The visualization of “Tolerate It,” a number about a woman’s feelings of long-term emotional neglect, was played out with Swift standing on top of and eventually crawling across a dining room table of “Citizen Kane”-style length to literally get in the face of a disinterested partner. The stage set is as wide and almost as tall as it was for the “Reputation” tour, but most of that heft is put to use with a giant curved screen now, versus the sense of a multi-story dystopian city you got in 2018. A certain type of fan might wish she would reinvent some of her catalog music for the purpose of touring, but the star who has rendered her “Taylor’s Version” renditions as exact soundalikes has never see arrangement-tweaking as much of a priority. Actually, somewhere in that sequence the tour’s overriding structure came into focus — that this would really be the “Albums Tour,” with a less clunky name. And not just “the new ones.” As Swift reminded a crowd that needed little reminding a ways into Friday night’s tour opening, “We added four new members to the family” since everyone last convened for the “Reputation” tour in 2018.