13 Best Moments From Taylor Swift’s April 29 Atlanta ‘Eras’ Concert – Billboard

A Heavenly ‘Marjorie’ Experience

Swift’s “Marjorie,” an ode full of love for her late grandmother and the memories she holds of her, is emotional enough in its recorded state. Live, with a chorus of tens of thousands of voices singing with Swift (plus her grandmother’s actual vocals in the background), and their phone lights glimmering, the song becomes emotionally overwhelming. “My knees went weak,” Swift said.

“I physically felt that. It was so beautiful of you to do that … Wow. Oh my god,” said Swift, sitting at her Evermore-era piano, getting ready to introduce “Champagne Problems” after showing a teary-eyed reaction to the unexpected magic of “Marjorie” in a stadium.

But “Champagne Problems” would have to wait, due a tech issue, leaving a minute to marvel at what just happened with “Marjorie”: “What a perfect moment for my in-ears to just come unplugged magically,” she quipped.

Later, after talking her way through the in-ear problem with a joke, Swift insisted that the moment of levity was “not to take away from the really beautiful, heavenly thing you guys just did.”

Glitches and Forgetting Lyrics For the Win

If Swift was at all stressing over the aforementioned, short-lived in-ear glitch, she didn’t show it. She corralled the Atlanta crowd’s attention Saturday night with a joke — more on that next — to fill in the sudden blank space in her otherwise impeccably-rehearsed set. The joke, whether you’ll find it funny or not, reminded fans of the superstar’s normal, very relatable disposition.

A moment like this, and a couple moments to come later on in the show where she’d charmingly flub a couple of her own lyrics during the night’s surprise songs section, brought a very big concert down to a more intimate level. Somehow, the small mistakes and Swift’s off-the-cuff reactions made the show even better, and a one-of-a-kind thing for those in attendance.

Taylor’s ‘Dad Joke From Hell’

“Oh, so it’s not just me, actually, this time. It’s not just me flailing too hard and unplugging my cord … It’s actually more of an infrastructure in-ears problem that we’re all having. So, while that is bad news, it’s nice to be joined in my pain, don’t you think?” Swift said to the April 29 audience.

Just when she thought the issue had been resolved, and she thanked and cheered on her sound crew, the glitch apparently happened again. She found herself with some more time to kill onstage and just went with it. “Should I tell jokes?” she asked.

And so it went: “OK, so, a cat walks into a library. And the cat says, ‘Yes, I’ll have some tuna fish, please.’ And the lady at the counter says, ‘Sir, this is a library.’ And the cat says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. [Whispers] I’ll have some tuna fish, please.”

“I’m so sorry,” Swift said with a grin. “My in-ears are back, just at the perfect time because that was like the dad joke from hell. I’m so sorry.” That’s probably one she won’t repeat this tour.

The Best Era Transitions

When you’re a weekend music news editor, avoiding spoilers about a massive tour with mostly weekend dates just isn’t a thing. Having seen plenty of clips from The Eras Tour prior to finally catching the show in person this weekend, there’s been time to think about the best transitions between the many eras in Swift’s set. Some are really, really good.

Now having witnessed it in real life at Swift’s Atlanta stop — where the coolest set transition became very clear — for fun, here’s a ranked list of Eras Tour transitions to watch out for at a concert in your future, leading with the favorite at No. 1:

More Than Just a Tour, It’s a ‘Whole Personality’

“This tour has become my entire personality,” Swift announced, in a genuine way, to her fans in Atlanta. Something tells us diehard Swifties can relate.

But Swift’s commitment to putting on an incredible show was very apparent this weekend. Concertgoers were overheard talking about being exhilarated but exhausted as they left the stadium, while Swift is actually the one performing 44 songs almost every weekend, for multiple days in a row.

She shows no signs of being anywhere but totally in Eras Tour-land when onstage. Just like there’s no bad seat in the house, there’s no chance she won’t be giving her all at every date to come. On Sunday night, she’d admit that she stays up for hours after every concert, thinking about the next one.

The Revival of ‘Reputation’

With Lover, Folklore, Evermore and Midnights all being brand-new to Swift’s touring production, there’s so much music to look forward to watching live for the first time. But Reputation lovers, rejoice: It’s one of the best parts of the show. When that snake slithers onto the stage screen, after the stirring Evermore era, the mood shifts drastically. The energy can’t be topped and fans go feral (in a good way) — maybe expressing a pent-up spark for live music that they’ve been missing since Swift’s last tour, which was in support of Reputation. Avoid timing a bathroom break during this era. In Atlanta, “…Ready for It?” and the rest of the Reputation set was powerful.

65,639 Voices Singing ‘All Too Well’ for 10 Minutes

Total attendance to the April 29 concert at Mercedes-Benz Stadium was 65,639. That’s potentially 65,639 people screaming along with Swift for 10 minutes to every word of “All Too Well,” and personally relating to it in some way. And in a way, the song that seemed to be one of her most personal breathes a new life when a stadium swells through the hurt in lines like “And I was thinking on the drive down, any time now/ He’s gonna say it’s love, you never called it what it was” and “And there we are again when nobody had to know/ You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath” and “You said if we had been closer in age maybe it would have been fine/ And that made me want to die” from the Red (Taylor’s Version) release.

‘August’ Forever

Although Billboard already highlighted “August” from the opener of the Eras Tour, the staging of a forever Folklore favorite — all wistful and romantic — continues to be flawless. It’s a beautiful time in the show, and a foundation of the Folklore set. Those lucky enough to have seats up front by the diamond area of the stage are in for a particularly special moment as Swift dashes across at the bridge of the song, but the view of “August” is lovely from all sections.

Knowing Exactly Where Taylor Swift Was on April 29

There’s that lyric in Swift’s “High Infidelity” that asks, “Do you really wanna know where I was April 29th?” Naturally, those attending the April 29 show in Atlanta had certain expectations that they might witness the track’s live debut during the part of the Eras set featuring two surprise acoustic songs. “High Infidelity” even trended on Twitter on Saturday morning, many hours before the concert began.

Swift acknowledged the date as she set herself up with a guitar at the end of the stage’s catwalk: In a special bit where she found herself rambling pre-song, she eventually teased, “I was thinking about what song to do tonight, and I was like, wait. I know it’s a Saturday, but what’s the date?”

Then she strummed her guitar and improvised, “Do you really wanna know where I was April 29th? Atlanta, Georgia,” before launching into the full song, with the crowd hanging on to to every word.

‘Gorgeous’ As a Sweet Piano Ballad

From “High Infidelity,” a song that some interpret as a reference to cheating, Swift went into “Gorgeous” on piano. On “Gorgeous,” she sings about meeting someone she’s attracted to while having “a boyfriend, he’s older than us/ He’s in the club doing I don’t know what.” Fans loved the seemingly clever thematic connection.

Even better, it was Swift’s first time performing a song from Reputation during her surprise songs set.

She joked that she thinks of Reputation as her “most metal album,” and thus more difficult to arrange as acoustic songs. But then she candidly noted to the audience, “That’s sort of weird for me to say because most of the songs on that album I started out writing just acoustic.”

This part of the set felt especially intimate in a full stadium, with Swift even relying on fans to help her remember the order of lyrics at one point.

Being One of the ’12 People’ Tracking Surprise Songs

Personal entertaining moment: Swift referenced that something like 12 people were out there keeping a list of her Eras Tour surprise songs, something this editor has been doing since weekend one of the tour. See Billboard‘s list of all the surprise songs so far right here. She also talked about folks making bets on the song selections each week, which is not happening here, but someone out there must be having fun with that.

‘Vigilante Shit’ Burning It Down

Several weeks into the tour, the crowd is still going absolutely nuts for “Vigilante Shit.”

Swift, dancing on chairs with her crew, puts on quite the theatrical performance — and it’s the sexiest performance of the night. Atlanta’s showing was no exception to this consistently excellent Eras act. If you can avoid any spoilers before her tour makes it your way, make it this one.

‘Midnight Rain’ Really Happened

There’s something ’bout the way the street looks when it’s just rained, right?

It’s tough to keep track of just how many times Swift’s written lyrics about rain over the years, and it was fitting to flood out of the stadium into a cool rainfall after the heat of “Vigilante Shit” and the high of the night’s super fun closer, “Karma,” as the clock neared midnight.