Day 3 Warm-Up: Inside the Eras Tour Setlist

Unofficial fan trivia. Boston Made is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Taylor Swift or her team. Every fact below comes from her public career.

Two days to go. Day 1 covered the Eras Tour’s headline numbers. Today we go inside the show itself: how it was structured, what opened and closed it, how it changed midway through, and the stats worth knowing for Friday.

The big picture

• First show: March 17, 2023, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.
• Last show: December 8, 2024, at BC Place in Vancouver, British Columbia.
• Total: 149 shows in 51 cities across 21 countries and five continents.
• Length: a typical show ran about 3 hours and 15 minutes, with 44 to 46 songs.

It was a career retrospective, built so that each album got its own section, its own costumes and its own staging. Fans call those sections acts, and there were 10 of them.

The tour ran for 21 months. It began as a run of U.S. stadium shows in 2023, then traveled through Latin America, Asia, Australia and Europe before closing with a final North American stretch in late 2024. Along the way, she wrote and released The Tortured Poets Department and recorded The Life of a Showgirl, which is why the show you saw depended on when you saw it.

The 2023 running order

When the tour opened in 2023, the acts ran in this order:

1. Lover
2. Fearless
3. evermore
4. reputation
5. Speak Now
6. Red
7. folklore
8. 1989
9. The acoustic set, with two surprise songs
10. Midnights

Each act was a mini-show of its own, with a costume change, new staging and its own color palette, so that moving from one act to the next felt like moving between albums. Notice what the list does not follow: release order. The show jumped around the catalog on purpose. The one album without its own act was the 2006 debut, which mostly appeared through the surprise songs.

How it opened and closed

Each night began with a countdown set to Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Own Me.” She then appeared with the opening of “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” which led into “Cruel Summer,” both from Lover. The show ended with “Karma,” from Midnights, with fireworks and confetti.

So if a question asks which album opened the Eras Tour show, the answer is Lover. Which album closed it? Midnights.

The 2024 revamp

The Tortured Poets Department came out on April 19, 2024, in the middle of the tour. When the European leg began in Paris that May, the show changed:

• A new Tortured Poets Department act was added between 1989 and the acoustic set.
• folklore and evermore were merged into a single act.
• Red moved up to third and Speak Now to fourth.
• Six songs were cut from their acts to make room.

The total stayed at 10 acts, but the lineup was different. Both versions count as “the Eras Tour setlist,” so read questions carefully for a year.

The surprise songs

The acoustic act was the part of the show that changed every night. She performed two surprise songs, one usually on acoustic guitar and one on piano, drawn from across her catalog. For the piano portion, the stage used an optical illusion that made it look as if a pool of water surrounded the piano and she swam back toward the main stage. Fans kept careful lists of every surprise song played, because the goal was to hear a song no other show had.

The 10-minute “All Too Well” was a fixture in the Red act. Over the full tour, it added up to roughly 25 hours of stage time.

The surprise-song slot was also where the 2006 debut got its moments, since that album had no act of its own. For trivia purposes, remember that the surprise songs were not a single fixed pair. Any question that asks “which surprise song was played” has to name a specific show, and the finale does not go there. The structure is what matters: two songs, guitar and piano, inside the acoustic act, changing every night.

The numbers to know

• Tickets: 10,168,008 sold.
• Gross: $2,077,618,725, the highest of any tour in history and the first above $2 billion. It was also the first tour to pass $1 billion.
• The Swift Quake: at Lumen Field in Seattle in July 2023, the crowd produced seismic activity equivalent to a magnitude 2.3 earthquake.
• The concert film: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour opened on October 13, 2023, and grossed more than $261 million worldwide, a record for a concert film.
• The finale on screen: on December 12, 2025, Disney+ released The Eras Tour: The Final Show, filmed at the last Vancouver show, along with a six-episode docuseries, The End of an Era.

One more distinction worth keeping straight: there are two Eras concert films. The first, released in theaters on October 13, 2023, captured the original 2023 show. The second, The Final Show, captured the revised 2024 version with the Tortured Poets act, filmed on the last night in Vancouver.

The short version for Friday: opened in Glendale, closed in Vancouver, 149 shows, 10 acts, Lover first and Midnights last.

The Swiftie Finale opens Friday, Nov. 13 at 1:13 p.m. ET.