Taylor Swift. John Shearer/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
Taylor Swift officially changed her Eras Tour setlist to include The Tortured Poets Department in her first concert since the album’s release.
The singer, 34, resumed the international leg of her tour at Paris La Défense Arena in France on Thursday, May 9. During the show, she added six songs to the already packed lineup: “But Daddy I Love Him” with a snippet of “So High School” as the outro, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,” “Down Bad,” “Fortnight,” The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” Swift also played “loml” during the acoustic set, right after the Midnights song “Paris.”
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The Tortured Poets Department set began with Swift’s background dancers slowly progressing onto the stage dressed all in white. Swift then emerged in a white dress with black ink writing on the skirt. She also donned a black choker necklace similar to the one she wore to the Grammys in February, the night she announced TTPD. Swift later removed the dress to reveal a black, sparkly bralette and matching high-waisted underwear. She added a gold jacket to the ensemble to perform the final song of the TTPD set, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.”
Swift has been on a two-month hiatus from her tour since performing in Singapore in March. During her time off, she released her 11th studio album in April, which she described in an Instagram post at the time as “an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time — one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure.”
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She continued: “This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.”
Buda Mendes/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
Two hours after the album’s release, Swift dropped 15 additional songs. “It’s a 2 a.m. surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album,” she wrote via Instagram. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past two years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. Fifteen extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore … it’s all yours.”
The Tortured Poets Department broke a multitude of records upon its debut, with its first-week total sales coming in at 2.61 million units. Swift celebrated the accomplishment in an April Instagram post.
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“My mind is blown. I’m completely floored by the love you’ve shown this album,” she gushed. “2.6 million ARE YOU ACTUALLY SERIOUS?? Thank you for listening, streaming and welcoming Tortured Poets into your life. Feeling completely overwhelmed.”
Swift then shared her enthusiasm over returning to the Eras Tour after the album’s success. “I was already so fired up to get back to the tour but you doing THIS??” she concluded. “May 9th can’t come soon enough.”
The Eras Tour kicked off in March 2023 and will run through December, and it already had a massive three-and-a-half hour setlist that highlighted hits from throughout Swift’s career. Still, fans speculated in April that she was planning to add The Tortured Poets Department after she shared a YouTube Shorts video of her tour rehearsals, where Swifties spotted several hints that changes were in the works. In one clip, Swift posed in front of a sign that appeared to feature the album’s logo, and in another segment, her backup dancers seemed to be practicing with new props.
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