How Paul McCartney inspired Taylor Swift’s marathon Eras Tour live set
When Taylor Swift saw Paul McCartney perform at a Nashville stadium in 2010, a few details lodged in her songwriter’s mind. Fans at her shows have witnessed their powerful impact.
When Taylor Swift saw Paul McCartney perform at a Nashville stadium in July 2010, a few details lodged in her songwriter’s mind as core memories.
One: the bond felt in the crowd was absolute, as tens of thousands of people gathered to celebrate and luxuriate in an extraordinary catalogue of music.
Two: her dad was crying at the power of hearing those songs in the flesh. Three: her mum’s hands were shaking as she tried to figure out how to work her phone to seal this moment in a photograph.
But it was the fourth memory that made the deepest impact on Swift, who was then aged just 20 and only two albums into her own career. And in a strange turn of events, she got to tell McCartney about it in 2020 when the two of them met at his London office for a conversation recorded for Rolling Stone magazine.
“The thing I took away from the show most was that it was the most selfless set list I had ever seen,” Swift told The Beatles great. “It was completely geared toward what it would thrill us to hear. It had new stuff, but it had every hit we wanted to hear, every song we’d ever cried to, every song people had gotten married to, or been broken-hearted to. And I just remember thinking, ‘I’ve got to remember that’ – that you do the set list for your fans.”
Years later, when she began plotting her next world tour, Swift must have had McCartney on her mind. As about 288,000 of her fans found across three performances in Melbourne last week, her Eras Tour is an enchanting marathon that spans 45 songs across nearly three and a half hours.
“I think that learning that lesson from you taught me at a really important stage in my career that if people want to hear Love Story and Shake It Off, and I’ve played them 300 million times – play them the 300-millionth-and-first time,” she told him in 2020. “I think there are times to be selfish in your career, and times to be selfless, and sometimes they line up.”
In response, McCartney shared something he remembered all too well: going to concerts as a kid, pre-Beatles fame, and looking forward to hearing his favourite songs.
“I really hoped they would play the ones I loved,” he said. “And if they didn’t, it was kind of disappointing. I had no money, and the family wasn’t wealthy. So this was a big deal for me, to save up for months to afford the concert ticket.”
The parallels to today are unavoidable: both Swift’s current tour – which finishes its Australian leg this weekend with four Sydney shows through to Monday – and McCartney’s visit to our shores last October featured high ticket prices, a fact that’s not lost on him.
“The people who come to our shows have spent a lot of money,” he told Swift. “We can afford to go to a couple of shows and it doesn’t make much difference. But a lot of ordinary working folks … it’s a big event in their life, and so I try and deliver.”
The stars’ London meeting was a wide-ranging chat full of diversions, including trading a list of favourite beautiful-sounding words: Swift revealed her love for “elegies”, “epiphany” and “divorcee”, and McCartney offered up “marzipan” and “kaleidoscope”.
But it was this exchange, about embracing the notion of giving a generous performance, that shimmered strongest in the memory this week, having witnessed Swift’s unforgettable Melbourne debut last Friday.
“It feels like a bond,” she told him, recalling the 2010 McCartney concert. “It feels like that person on the stage has given something, and it makes you as a crowd want to give even more back in terms of applause, in terms of dedication […] Because seeing the excitement course through not only me, but my family and the entire crowd in Nashville, it just was really special.”
“I love learning lessons, and not having to learn them the hard way,” she said.
“Well, that’s great, and I’m glad that set you on that path,” McCartney replied.
In six years of writing about music for this newspaper and attending hundreds of shows, I have seen only a handful that I’d describe as perfect. McCartney’s visit last year was one of them; I was lucky enough to see it three times, and I can confirm its brilliance was not dimmed through repeat viewings.
Elton John’s final concert in Brisbane last year was another. And in terms of pure pop music, the only other perfect show I had seen was Dua Lipa in 2022 – a remarkably polished performance for an artist only two albums into her career.
Walking out of the MCG after seeing Swift’s Eras Tour concert, I was flooded with the same sense of elation and euphoria that each of those other performers had evoked.
Perfection can be a troublesome word when applied to a subjective field such as the arts – as my colleague Alan Howe and I found last year, when we picked 52 flawless albums for a Review feature – but there was simply no better word for what had transpired on stage last Friday.
I wrote as much afterwards in my review. And if my reflection on the concert transmitted even a fraction of what Swift made a stadium full of “universally cheerful, friendly people” feel that night – as Leigh Sales put in her own review – then I’m grateful.
Like at the McCartney shows, which offered a relentlessly entertaining 39-song setlist that approached three hours, Swift’s concerts sparkle with a rare sense of fellowship, love and fun.
These great artists are at different points of their working lives – she is 34, he is 81 – but what they share is an extraordinary generosity and selflessness as performers.
They both know that wherever in the world their respective tours touch down, it’s a big event in the lives of their fans, and not exactly a cheap night out. As the musicians at the centre of the storm, all they can do is try to deliver something that meets our outrageously high hopes – and they do.
More Coverage
