"This one's from '1989,'" Taylor Swift said to some 70,000 fans on the second night of her Eras Tour stop in Nashville. She was strumming her guitar and in the middle of a sportive preamble to the first surprise song of the show. "It's got kind of one of those choruses where you say the same thing over and over and over again." The crowd's screams drowned out everything after the first "over." The secret was up. The surprise song had been unveiled. The stadium was ready to sing "Out of the Woods" and to bask in the glory of their loot.
In an era of Eras literature, which has ascended to its own genre of pop culture commentary, it can be a little too easy to hitch a ride on the bandwagon of awe and adulation — to uncritically aggrandize a billion-dollar enterprise. I'll try to be a tad more circumspect in my deliberation of an Eras phenomenon that remains curiously under-analyzed despite having sparked a refreshing new frontier in the world of stadium tours: Swift's surprise songs couplet. (The preponderance of existing literature on the subject seems to consist of long song lists, in addition to one insipid Forbes exposition that rather misses the point.)
