by Julian Spivey
Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives brought their eclectic style of country music – featuring traditional country, bluegrass, folk, rockabilly and surf/psychedelic rock to the Palomino Stage at the 2023 Stagecoach Festival on Saturday night (April 29).

The band absolutely stunned those watching live from the venue and those of us watching the live stream via Amazon Prime Video or Amazon Music’s Twitch with their musicianship with Marty Stuart showing off on mandolin, “Cousin” Kenny Vaughan on guitar, Chris Scruggs on bass and Harry Stinson on drums – though also showing off with his vocal on the Woody Guthrie classic “Pretty Boy Floyd.”

Stuart always gives the Fabulous Superlatives a chance to show off on vocals during his regular shows and even though this was about a 45-minute festival set it was nice to see this still happen. My favorite performance was Stinson’s, but Vaughan and Scruggs had their time to shine too.

The band performed some of their usual hits like “Tear the Woodpile Down” and “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’,” while mixing in some of the surf-rock of their most recent release Way Out West from 2017. One of the set’s highlights was a new release from the group called “Sitting Alone,” which will be on their upcoming album Altitude, which debuts on May 19.

Where Stuart truly had a moment to show off on his beautiful mandolin was a cover of the country/bluegrass traditional “Orange Blossom Special.”

The stream on Amazon Music’s Twitch page had a live chat going with it, which was a really interesting thing to follow along with. You basically had three types of people watching: fans of Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives, people who were just being introduced to them and blown away (these were my favorites) and those complaining about the music and wondering when Kane Brown’s set was going to happen.

Earlier in the day, Nikki Lane performed at the Palomino Stage and showed off her brand of Outlaw country/Americana.

Her 2022 release Denim & Diamonds was one of the best country/Americana albums of last year and she performed many tracks from it during her 45-minute set, including the title track, “Black Widow” and “First High,” which was my favorite from the album.

Lane has this take no prisoners attitude about her when performing absolutely owning the stage. She’s a regular at Stagecoach Festival and you can tell some of the veterans who return to the festival annually absolutely adore her.

Other terrific performances from her set included the set ending “Jackpot” and “Highway Queens,” off the 2017 album of the same name, and “Right Time,” “Man Up” and “700,000 Rednecks,” which she began her set with.

Over at the Mane Stage (intentionally spelled that way as in a horse’s mane) during the afternoon, up-and-comer Morgan Wade, whose 2021 Thirty Tigers label debut Reckless was one of that year’s highlights and really put her on the map gave a terrific 45-minute or so set of some of the finest tracks on the album.

There’s an edge to Wade (covered in tattoos) and her music that has some labeling her alternative country, but whatever you want to call it it’s excellent.

My favorite track off Reckless was “Take Me Away,” a song about getting lost in the loving of someone as a means of taking your mind off life’s troubles. It was my favorite performance of her set.

Other terrific performances from Reckless included: “Last Cigarette,” “Mend” and “The Night.” She ended her set with another one of my favorites from the album, “Wilder Days.”

The surprise of Wade’s performance was her mash-up covers of The Outfield’s 1986 top-10 hit “Your Love” and Rick Springfield’s 1981 No. 1 smash “Jessie’s Girl.” I never realized how well these songs would meld together, so kudos to Wade and her band for knocking it out of the park.

by Julian Spivey
​ZZ Top brought their Texas brand of blues rock to the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, Calif. on Friday night (April 28) with what amounted to a greatest hits set for the fine folks at the Palomino Stage.

You might be saying to yourself, ‘Wait, isn’t Stagecoach a country music festival?’ Yes, dear reader, it is, but if they have acts like Luke Bryan calling themselves country we might as well include a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame act like ZZ Top too. Hell, Nelly performed on Saturday night.
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ZZ Top is one of the few actively touring rock bands that I’ve wanted to see in concert, but every time they come to my neck of the woods I seem to have other plans that can’t be avoided. So, seeing their set streamed from Stagecoach via Amazon Primo Video (the festival can also be streamed for free at Amazon Music’s Twitch page) might be the closest I’m ever going to get.

As I previously said, it was pretty much a greatest hits set for the trio as a condensed version of their regular stage show, but when it comes to a legendary band like ZZ Top isn’t a greatest hits show basically what you want from them.

This was the first opportunity I’ve gotten to see the group since the passing of original member bassist Dusty Hill in 2021. Elwood Francis has taken over the bass and co-vocal duties with guitarist and lead vocalist Billy Gibbons. Frank Beard, as always, has the sticks at the back of the stage.

The trio began their set with a rocking “Got Me Under Pressure,” off one of their most famous albums Eliminator. The album just celebrated the 40th anniversary of its release last month. The trio would perform two more songs off that album during their 45-minute or so set on Friday night – “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs,” which was a top-10 hit for the band.

One of my favorite performances of the evening was a cover of the Merle Travis/Tennessee Ernie Ford country classic “Sixteen Tons,” which I believe the group breaks out fairly regularly on their tour. They said they had to do a country song for Stagecoach.

Other classics performed by the trio on the Palomino Stage were “I’m Bad I’m Nationwide,” off 1979’s Degüello, and “Just Got Paid,” all the way back from the band’s sophomore release Rio Grande Mud in 1972.

The trio finished off their Stagecoach set with the awesome one-two punch of “Tube Snake Boogie,” off 1981’s El Loco, and, of course, “La Grange,” which is likely their all-time greatest song from 1973’s Tres Hombres, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its release on July 26.

There were really only two sets on day one of Stagecoach that I wanted to see on Friday – ZZ Top’s in the evening and American Aquarium’s from early in the afternoon – and this is where I have some qualms about the coverage done by Amazon. Coachella, which takes place at the same location in Indio as Stagecoach, just happened the last two weekends and was streamed live on YouTube, as it has been for a few years or so. YouTube shows almost every set of the entire festival unless an artist explicitly refuses as headliner Frank Ocean did in his much-controversial performance two weeks ago. They also have different feeds showing the different stages and it all appears to be live. Well, Amazon claims their stream is live, but simply looking at the stream set times and the ones on the Stagecoach website shows it’s not true. I believe the headliners’ sets might be live, but even those may be delayed slightly.

That’s really the smallest issue I have with Amazon’s coverage of the festival, which I’m fairly curtained was also streamed by YouTube in 2022. My biggest complaints are there’s only one stream, so the service is basically stitching together performances from the Mane (it’s spelled that way intentionally as in “horse’s mane”) and Palomino Stages and if you like any performers on the other stages you’re out of luck. They’re also not showing every performance, which is why I didn’t get to see American Aquarium’s performance on Friday. Man, what that could have potentially done for that band’s music. Another major con to Amazon’s Stagecoach performance is unlike YouTube’s coverage they don’t allow you to watch non-live performances – there’s no rewinding and fast-forwarding to see sets you missed.

I know these are all trivial things and I am glad the Stagecoach Festival is being streamed in some form, but when we see as fans how it can be done better it’s head-scratching why one of the richest businesses in the world can’t give us what we want.  

 
Stagecoach Festival, one of country music’s biggest concert festivals, begins today in Indio, Calif. one weekend after the two-week Coachella Festival at the same location wrapped up. Stagecoach features some of the biggest names in mainstream country music, while also showcasing some acts that maybe lesser known or more popular in the independent or alternative country music scene. 

Some of the bigger mainstream acts at Stagecoach this year include superstars Luke Bryan, Kane Brown and Old Dominion, who frankly I have absolutely no use for – but if you’re willing to tune in earlier in the day over the three-day event you might find some truly great country music.

This year’s festival can be streamed live via Amazon Prime Video and the Amazon Music Twitch channel (for those who aren’t Prime subscribers). However, I’m not certain yet if all sets will be streaming. Hopefully, Amazon will have it set up similarly to how YouTube streams Coachella with multiple streams from the different stages going at once.

Here are 10 can’t-miss acts from Stagecoach Festival 2023:

All times below will be Pacific Time Zone

American Aquarium – Friday, April 28 @ 3:05 p.m. – Palomino Stage
OK, so the T-Mobile Mane (not a typo, like a horse’s mane) Stage features the bigger, mainstream acts – which I’ve found are the ones I typically won’t give two seconds of my time to, so the really awesome place for music at Stagecoach is the Palomino Stage, with a more traditional or outcast sound. American Aquarium is honestly more of a rock band to me than a country band – but they’re freakin’ awesome whatever you want to call their style of music. I’ve seen American Aquarium, led by songwriter and frontman B.J. Barham, multiple times in concert and they put on a helluva show where you can see they’re giving everything they have from the stage.

ZZ Top – Friday, April 28 @ 7:45 p.m. – Palomino Stage
So, you’re probably thinking right now, I thought he said this was a country music festival. Why is ZZ Top here? OK, so Stagecoach is a country music festival but it does feature other artists who are maybe somewhat close to the genre or just fit the Stagecoach demo a little better than they would the Coachella demo. The Texas blue-rock trio ZZ Top isn’t as weird as the inclusion of R&B/Motown legend Smokey Robinson (though I did watch and enjoy that set) last year. I’ll take ZZ Top performing some of their greatest hits over Friday night’s headliner Luke Bryan any day of the week.

Lola Kirke – Saturday, April 29 @ 3 p.m. – Horseshoe Stage
I knew and enjoyed Lola Kirke as an actor from Amazon Prime Video’s four-season-long comedy “Mozart in the Jungle,” which I felt was underrated. But, last year Kirke released the album Lady for Sale and it included a couple of my favorite songs of the year in “Broken Families” and “Pink Sky.” She performs a sort of old-school meets modern type of country music that isn’t afraid to mix synthesizers in with Emmylou Harris-esque vocals.

Nikki Lane – Saturday, April 29 @ 4:15 p.m. – Palomino Stage
Saturday truly is a great day for women of country music at Stagecoach – be sure to check out Mary Chapin Carpenter, Jamie Wyatt and Morgan Wade too if you have time on this day – and Nikki Lane will bring her high-octane country rock to the Palomino Stage. Lane’s most recent album Denim & Diamonds was a highlight of last year with tracks like “First High” and “Born Tough,” which she’ll hopefully play during her set.

Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives – Saturday, April 29 @ 6:30 p.m. – Palomino Stage
While some people on Saturday at Stagecoach are no doubt going to be pumped for the modern sounds of Kane Brown and Old Dominion over at the Mane Stage, it’ll be the old-school, traditional yet mixed with a desert country-rock twinge of Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives that I’ll be salivating over. I’ve seen Stuart and the boys on multiple occasions and they always put on an epic country music show.

49 Winchester – Sunday, April 30 @ 1:05 p.m. – Palomino Stage
49 Winchester feels like the next big thing in the non-mainstream country music world. They could be the next Turnpike Troubadours or Tyler Childers, who’ll be performing on the same stage later in the day. So, it’s somewhat disheartening that the best they could get was the 1:05 p.m. slot and merely a half-hour set time on the final day of Stagecoach. If you’ve never heard this group’s music you’ll want to make sure to catch this afternoon performance. Their album Fortune Favors the Bold was one of 2022’s best.

Turnpike Troubadours – Sunday, April 30 @ 5:40 p.m. – Palomino Stage
The Turnpike Troubadours reunited last summer after nearly a half-decade hiatus and have gone from a band that played smaller venues before their break to a band that’s now selling out arenas. I’m honestly not sure how their popularity bloomed over their hiatus, but it’s incredibly nice to see for what I think is the finest band in country music since 2010. You can be sure to get a Stagecoach set that resembles what many fans would call their greatest hits.

Tyler Childers – Sunday, April 30 @ 7 p.m. – Palomino Stage
Tyler Childers may be the hardest ticket of any non-mainstream (that is frequently played on radio) artist in the entire country to find. His shows are selling out fast, as well as being picked up and sold for exorbitant prices on the secondary market. So, if you want to see Childers, doing so on the Stagecoach stream might be your best shot. It’s Appalachian country folk music in its finest modern state.   

Brooks & Dunn – Sunday, April 30 @ 8 p.m. – Mane Stage
OK, so Sunday night is when the Mane Stage at Stagecoach becomes acceptable with Brooks & Dunn and Chris Stapleton closing out the festival. Brooks & Dunn is the most successful duo in country music history and no doubt will be bringing a set filled with their greatest hits to the Mane Stage. It’s a group old enough for traditional country fans to enjoy while being cool enough and having sing-along tracks like “Neon Moon” for the younger crowd to dig, as well.

Chris Stapleton – Sunday, April 30 @ 9:30 p.m. – Mane Stage
Chris Stapleton has been one of the few worthy performers on mainstream country radio over the last decade with his excellent songwriting and his stellar bluesy, soulful voice. Stapleton headlines the final night of the Stagecoach Festival and if you’re trying to go for a current performer who can also thrill an old-school country music fan like me there’s no better choice to close out the show. 

by Julian Spivey
You won’t be as cool as Debbie Harry when you’re 77 years old. That’s the conclusion I came to while watching the Blondie Coachella set from the Mojave stage on Friday, April 14. I don’t think it’s possible most people could be.

Harry has always been an icon from the moment the band became regulars at legendary New York City venues like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB in the mid- ‘70s and released their self-titled debut album in late 1976 with a new sound that mixed pop, rock, funk, punk, eventually disco, reggae and even rap in a mixture that became known as new wave.

While I’ve never been the biggest listener of Blondie – liking some of the group’s hits but rarely choosing to spin it or click on it on a streaming service – I wanted to see the set because when a legendary act takes such a stage, still has it and the stream is free you shouldn’t pass it up.

Appearing in acid-washed pants, a leather vest jacket and sleek, thin black sunglasses, Harry looked both old-school rebel and futuristic in a way I think only she could truly pull off. She’s truly always been known as much as a fashion icon as a musical one.   

There weren’t many shots of the Mojave tent crowd at all on the live stream so I couldn’t get a picture of the makeup of the crowd, but they sure seemed to be into the whole 10-song set based on crowd noise alone – whether they were being introduced to Blondie for the first time or nostalgic for the sounds of their youth.

The group, which has always consisted of Harry, Chris Stein on guitar and Clem Burke on drums, also featured Leigh Foxx on bass, Matt Katz-Bohen on keyboards and Tommy Kessler on guitar.

Blondie opened its roughly hour-long set with their rocking classic “One Way or Another,” from their 1978 album Parallel Lines. The song, which remains a staple on both retro pop and classic rock format radio stations, was a top 25 hit in 1979 and a perfect way to begin their show on Friday night.

Blondie performed the majority of their “greatest hits” on Friday night with my personal favorite being “Call Me,” a no. 1 hit from 1980, which was recorded for directed Paul Schrader’s film “American Gigolo” starring Richard Gere. I also really enjoyed “Heart of Glass,” the penultimate performance of the night, which was the band’s first major hit when it topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1979. The group also got around to their third and fourth no. 1 hits, the reggae-infused “The Tide is High” from 1980 and “Rapture,” which was the first Billboard no. 1 to contain a rap verse (albeit a frankly amateurish and kind of lame one) in 1981. Blondie’s four no. 1 hits from 1979-1981 showed there was an era in popular music they utterly dominated – interestingly enough those four no. 1s are the only top 20 hits of their career.

Late during their set Blondie was joined on stage by producer, musician and composer Nile Rodgers, who played guitar on “Rapture” and “Backfired.” The band would end their set with “Dreaming,” off 1979’s Eat to the Beat.

Frankly, I was going to review the Coachella set of late ‘90s/early ‘00s pop-punk-rock trio Blink-182, but I couldn’t get more than 15 minutes into their set before bailing. The original trio consisting of bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus, guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge and drummer Travis Barker recently reunited and I believe this was their first live performance since the reunion. I remember the trio having a few hits around the time I was 12-13 years old with “What’s My Age Again?” and “All the Small Things,” which are fine if not a bit whiny pop-punk numbers. They were “cool” with folks around my age or just a bit older around the turn of the century, but honestly, as an adult, I see it for what it is: utter bullshit bitching about stuff that doesn’t matter. The real punks always had stuff to actually sing about and important stuff to take on – societal wrongs, “the man,” etc. These guys just come off as wannabe punks who think it’s cool to sing George Carlin’s “seven dirty words.” It is quite laughable and even somewhat sad to see them as late 40/early 50-somethings doing this.  

 
Dawes returned to The Revolution Room in Little Rock, Ark. on Monday, April 11 for the first time in more than five years but like it so often does when spending time with old friends it didn’t feel like there had been much distance at all.

Dawes, the band out of Los Angeles fronted by songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Taylor Goldsmith, has had a fruitful half-decade-plus since their last performance in Little Rock with the release of three albums since then: 2018’s Passwords, 2020’s Good Luck with Whatever and last year’s Misadventures of Doomscroller.

The band performed eight songs from these three albums throughout the evening, which consisted of two sets with maybe a 15-minute break between the two. While I would probably tell you I’m a bigger fan of the band’s earlier output than the last three albums the selection of songs from those albums on Monday night was truly impeccable and lined up with what I consider to be some of my favorite tracks from those albums, including “Comes in Waves” (my favorite song off Misadventures of Doomscroller) and “St. Augustine at Night,” (my favorite song off Good Luck with Whatever) which Goldsmith played solo early on in the second set. I also really enjoyed “Who Do You Think You’re Talking To?” from Good Luck with Whatever.

The band began the night with an epic performance of “Someone Else’s Café/Doomscroller Tries to Relax,” the lead track off the most recent album which clocks in at nine minutes and 26 seconds on the album and is at least that long performed live. It’s a real jam.

The band truly jammed all night, which surely is something they must’ve done the two previous times I’d seen them, but I just don’t remember the sheer shredding on every instrument in the band. I think this is because I’ve always considered myself a lyrics fan first and music fan second and Taylor Goldsmith is one of the best (and certainly underrated) songwriters of his generation with such conversational verses and incredibly literary and often witty turns of phrase.

Part of the reason Dawes may have seemed to jam harder than I remembered on Monday night, was guitarist Trevor Menear, who’s joined the group since I’d last seen them. He absolutely shreds on the guitar and was a true highlight the entire evening. The entire band is a tight-fit, perfect blend of rocking sounds with Griffin Goldsmith holding it down on drums, Lee Pardini on keys and Wylie Gelber on bass. It was a bit bittersweet seeing the band on Monday because Gelber, an original member of the group, will be leaving the band after the tour wraps this month. According to a past social media post by Taylor Goldsmith, Gelber will shift his career goals to being a designer/contractor/builder. I guess some of us have to grow up, after all.

Dawes has reached the point in their career where they have a good discography of albums and incredibly they seem to be able and capable of playing any and every song in that discography and they switch up their setlists every night – this made it hard for someone like me who actually kind of likes spoilers to plan ahead to figure out what would be played. I like learning songs I may not know quite as well so I can shout along at the shows.

So, there were definitely songs played on Monday night I didn’t know quite as well as my favorite Dawes recordings like “Ghost in the Machine,” “Living in the Future,” “To Be Completely Honest” and “Time Flies Either Way,” but they all sounded well – even if I couldn’t make out all of the words due to the sound close by the stage – blaring instruments with the occasional hard time making out lyrics.

The group also played a new song, “What It Takes,” that just debuted on Friday and sounded pretty awesome live, even though I’ll have to go to Spotify to catch all of the lyrics. Goldsmith also debuted another song solo at the beginning of the second set called “King of the Never Wills,” which was amazing, and I could hear well because it was just him and his guitar.

Among my favorite songs performed at The Rev Room were “Things Happen” off 2015’s All Your Favorite Bands and “Time Spent in Los Angeles” off 2011’s Nothing is Wrong.  

But there were two performances of the evening that I would classify as magical. The first came at the very end of the first set when the band performed “When My Time Comes” off their 2009 debut North Hills, which essentially put them on the map and to this day is probably the ultimate fan-favorite of their work.

In 2013, I had recently become a huge fan of singer-songwriter Jason Isbell and saw he was opening for Dawes at The Rev Room that October. I had never seen Isbell and this was his first show in my neck of the woods since I’d become acquainted with his work. To this date, it’s still the only time I’ve ever bought a concert ticket for the opening act having zero clue who the headliner was. Isbell was terrific that night. But I also became a fan of Dawes that night – and the biggest moment of that was the reaction of seeing the crowd of hardcore fans absolutely having a cathartic moment during the song and screaming along, especially to its epic chorus.

Four years later I was one of those fans having a cathartic experience singing along to “When My Time Comes” and another six years after that there I was on Monday night at The Rev Room feeling it all over again. It only gets better every time.

My other favorite moment was Taylor Goldsmith’s solo, one-song encore at the very end of the night when he performed my favorite Dawes song, “A Little Bit of Everything,” off Nothing is Wrong. It’s an absolute beauty of a song and an emotional listen. I’d seen the band perform it before, which is terrific, but it was also a nice, moving experience seeing the man who wrote it perform it, just him and his guitar, in a room full of strangers who’ve become a community with their shared love of music.

by Tyler Glover
Are you “...Ready For It?”

I think I can speak for every Swiftie in the world when I say we were all dying with anticipation to see Taylor Swift in concert again. The last time Swift toured was in 2018 with the blockbuster event, “Reputation: The Stadium Tour.” She had originally planned a 2020 tour called “Lover Fest” that was unfortunately canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Swift has dropped tons of new music since then. Following Lover in 2019 was folklore and evermore in 2020. In 2021, Swift dropped two of her re-recorded albums Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) as a part of her mission to reclaim her masters. Then, last year in October, Swift released her tenth studio album, Midnights to massive critical and commercial acclaim. With all this new music, how would Swift do a tour? Would it just be for Midnights and neglect the other albums? Absolutely not! Swift announced “The Eras Tour,” a show that would go through all of the eras of her career. For ordinary artists, it would be called a greatest hits tour but Swift has shown us all, she is anything but ordinary.

Part of what has made Swift arguably the biggest pop star on the planet is her shifts into these different eras throughout her career. She has transitioned from country to pop to indie/folk and back to pop. Each career shift has brought her more fans that have consequently looked into her past music upon becoming a fan in her newer eras. It has not only been a great creative move for Swift but also a bold one - a move that has paid off for her big time. Every album has its own color associated with it, its own vibe, its own theme, and its own sound. This is why this could never have been called a “Greatest Hits” tour. This is not a night with a singer sitting on a stool or at the piano simply singing all their hits. For Swift, a tour of her career is a transformation! The “Eras Tour” allows us to revisit all the different versions of Swift that we have all grown to love over the last 17 years. The “Eras Tour” came with very high expectations and Swift delivered not only the best concert of her career.

I had the absolute pleasure of seeing “The Eras Tour” on Saturday, April 1st at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. It was a beautiful spring day with the sun shining as bright as all of the sequins on all of the 70,000 fans waiting to enter the stadium. Everywhere you looked, someone was dressed as a different era. I have thrown two Taylor Swift-themed birthday parties in the last two years where my friends and I have dressed up as different eras of Taylor. At this event, it was like a continuation of this party but surrounded by so many more people with the goal of honoring the queen of pop music.
 
Swift could have gone about this show in so many ways. She could have gone in chronological order taking us from 2006 to now, she could have grouped everything by genre, or she could choose the order herself. What Swift did was truly magnificent! Swift started with the Lover set taking us into full pop. She then transitioned to country with Fearless and then to her indie/folk genre with evermore. The most jarring transition was from evermore to reputation. Swift took us from the log cabin in the calm woods to the city dive bar like we were in a “Getaway Car.” What I truly think worked about this order was that it highlighted her versatility as an artist. We truly see an artist that has grown and expressed her truth in so many different ways.
 
What made this concert a must-see event was Swift’s commitment to truly bring the eras to life. We get a log cabin, trees in the forest, city lights, a lit-up guitar on the stage, glow-in-the-dark motorcycles, fire, and a truly creepy snake. Swift dresses the parts of those eras to pure perfection. We are taken back to Swift as a country artist with her fringe dress and cowgirl boots holding her guitar. We got her beautiful multi-colored leotard and shiny boots for Lover. She wears a beautiful gown when singing “Enchanted” from the fairytale album, Speak Now. Every set and costume highlighted each era perfectly and allowed us all to encounter the version of Swift that led to us going by the title: “Swiftie.” 
 
Swift sings a whopping 44 songs from her discography. Forty-two of these have stayed almost completely the same with two surprise songs that she has been singing differently at every stop. The two surprise songs we were treated with were “Death By A Thousand Cuts” and “Clean.” Both of these songs are in my top 30 of my favorite Swift songs so I was thrilled with these choices.

Another aspect of Swift’s shows that are special is that her fans are devoted. They listen to the entire album and learn all the words. I have been to many other concerts and you will notice the crowd will sing really loudly on the songs that were on the radio but you notice a huge decline in singing when it is a song just on the album. This does NOT happen at a Swift concert. You can hear the crowd singing every single song and every single lyric during a Swift show. It really shows us all that music is something that can unite us and Swift is an artist that truly highlights this.

“The Eras Tour” was everything I could have wanted it to be. I have tickets to go see the show again in Nashville on May 5th. I have never been happier to say that I get to see a show for a second time in person.