Bye, Taylor Swift: Show over, but Singapore will keep looking at you

Source: The Straits Times
Author: Yamini Chinnuswamy

SINGAPORE - "Confetti falls to the ground, may these memories break our fall," goes a line in American pop star Taylor Swift's song Long Live, off her third album Speak Now (2010).

As she closed out her sixth and final concert on March 9 with confetti and fireworks, surely that was the refrain that some 63,000 fans were clinging to as they left the National Stadium.

Swift, 34, took the stage slightly later than usual, around 7.10pm, but it was to clear skies. That was the only concert not marred by rain and oppressive humidity before or during showtime since her Singapore leg began on March 2.

For once, Swift's straightened dirty blonde locks did not return to its "factory settings" of wavy and curly within the first hour.

But those hoping for more firsts from the last of her Asia-Pacific performances - the Eras Tour takes a break before the Europe circuit kicks off in Paris on May 9 - would have been disappointed.

For instance, Swift did not offer any sneak peeks of her upcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, which comes out on April 19. She did not even acknowledge it, despite this being her last gig before release day.

Even the presence of her boyfriend, American football player Travis Kelce, was not exactly new. He had already been spotted in a VIP suite on March 8, prompting Swift to twice tweak a line in her song Karma (2022) to "Karma is the guy on the Chiefs, coming straight home to me".

Kelce, 34, plays for the Kansas City Chiefs, a professional American football team.

Even backup dancer Kameron Saunders seemed to have run out of Singaporeanisms for Swift's performance of We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, when he routinely shoots off the final zinger to Swift's monologue in the bridge.

Instead of "like ever", Saunders came up with "hanor, abuden?" for the last Singapore show. This is a Singlish deep-cut that indicates exasperated agreement, but it seemed less exciting than the other classic Singlish phrases he whipped out on previous shows, including "no lah" and "alamak".

More notably, however, Swift was the first female act to headline six shows at the National Stadium, as the superstar herself proudly highlighted. More than 386,000 people had streamed through the doors over the week of concerts.

A significant number of these Swifties had travelled to Singapore from all over the region for the occasion. As Swift observed on March 9, that crowd "definitely (had) the home town outnumbered".

What was perhaps most remarkable was the reality that whether you had attended on March 9 - or 2, 3, 4, 7 or 8 - you would have enjoyed virtually the same experience as everyone else.