Why is Taylor Swift so big? She ‘wants it more than anyone’

For fans, it’s the personal connection that makes Swift so special. They hear themselves in her lyrics, as she navigates love, illness, treacherous friendships, and finding your place in the world.

“To see someone flourish like Taylor has, it gives hope to the rest of us,” one young fan told me at a playback for Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, in April.

“You have this amazingly powerful woman, who goes through it ten-fold because of the media – but she is just continually growing,” added another. “She’s such an inspiration.”

The sentiment is echoed by Katy Ellis, who has been performing as a Taylor Swift tribute act for more than a decade.

“I never get sick of singing the songs,” she says. “Depending on your mood, you can go, ‘Oh, I relate to this one today’. And I think that’s why she’s so popular.”

Swift is aware that relatability is her USP. In concert, she continually uses pronouns like “we” and “us” when she addresses the crowd.

And every tour stop gets two unique songs, tailored to the local crowd, during the star’s acoustic set. In Scotland, fans are already theorising she’ll play Guilty As Sin, as it references local band The Blue Nile.

Unlike Beyoncé and Madonna’s recent tours, where the driving thesis seemed to be, “cast your eyes upon these divine beings, in whose presence you must bow down”, the Eras tour is more like a celebration: “Hey you guys, we did this together!”

“I thought to myself ‘How can I keep our connection going?’ So I decided to make and release as many albums as humanly possible,” Swift told the audience at California’s SoFi Stadium last year.

“People around me were saying… ‘What are you going to do – a tour where you just play all the music, and it’s just three and and a half hours long?’

“And I was like, ‘Yeah, well, that’s exactly what I’m doing. It’s called the Eras Tour.’”