What to expect as pop superhero Taylor Swift, her legion of fans hit Cincinnati

The Empress arrives this weekend. You will have to drive about 90 minutes to see her, that is if you are lucky enough to have a ticket for admission. Many of her rabidly enthralled followers aren’t and don’t.

She will cast a long shadow, one as vast as a football field. She will fill everywhere around her with music – songs of light, love and ex-boyfriends whose misdeeds are forever annotated in her proclamations.

Hysteria will shake the very foundations of the earth she surveys and rock the core of the parking lots that will swell and congest in her wake.

And, make no mistake, the Empress will make a bundle by the time she leaves town. Bank on that. She will.

The gala we speak of is the two-night, sold-out, stadium-size return of Taylor Swift. She will bring her Eras Tour to Cincinnati’s Paycor Stadium on June 30 and July 1. Tickets, like all dates on the tour, disappeared within hours of going on sale last fall. Just ask Ticketmaster how much fun that was. The online ticketing service crashed when the on-sale date for the 52-city tour arrived, earning the vendor a public rebuke from Swift and a summons to the United States Senate over antitrust concerns.

At this point, it’s hard to imagine a time when Swift was not a generation-embracing star. Promoted largely as a country artist at first, her preference for pop songcraft began to take over by the time her Speak Now Tour landed at Rupp Arena before a crowd of 16,000 in October 2011. Swift was 21 at the time. The performance would be the first of three headlining concerts she presented at Rupp in just under four years. She hit attendance figures of 17,000 each for shows in April 2013 and October 2015.

Taylor Swift parties in Rupp Arena like it was 1989

After that, Swift was secure in a pop empire that had simply outgrown Rupp – and all arenas, for that matter. Her last visit to the region was a June 2018 concert in Louisville at the then-named Cardinal Stadium before a crowd of 52,000.

A planned 2020 tour was scrubbed thanks to – what else? – the COVID-19 pandemic. But Swift used the downtime to maximum marketing and artistic effect. Free from ties to the Big Machine music label, which helped launch her career, Swift recorded and released two new studio albums during the pandemic – the indie folk-pop flavored 2020 works, “Folklore” and “Evermore.”

Both earned Swift some of the most favorable reviews of her career. In addition, she re-cut two earlier albums (“Fearless” and “Red”) after ownership of master recordings to the original versions became legally entangled following Swift’s departure from Big Machine. Add to that another new record, 2022’s “Midnights,” a third reworking of an earlier project (“Speak Now”) and 2019’s electro-pop-centric “Lovers,” the original tour for which was the COVID casualty, and you have an amassed total of seven albums since Swift was last on the road.

This brings to mind the theme of the concert run that has generated so much by way of sales and enthusiasm this year. Aptly titled The Eras Tour, Swift’s current performance program is devoting attention to music from each of her 10 albums. By all accounts, the show is a watershed in terms of production, both in terms of the staging devoted to each record and the reportedly boundless stamina Swift has been exhibiting in navigating through the three-hour set.

Not surprisingly, reviews have underscored how devoted and behaved the swarms have been at Swift’s shows, which have included lots of mother-daughter (and father-daughter) patrons.

“The crowd was ecstatic, doting and very sober,” remarked Amanda Petrusich in a New Yorker review of Swift’s May concert at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey before an estimated crowd of 70,000. “The line for chicken fingers was, per my calculation, fifteen times longer than the line for beer.”

The sense of ordered hysteria at these performances is practically an expectation. Swift’s Rupp concerts abounded with young fans listening intently to the songs and sentiments of a young artist. I remember several parents at all three outings remarking that the show at hand was their child’s (usually, daughter’s) first concert experience. Swift seemed to sense that and played to her audience with a sisterly yet adult command that never seemed forced or false.

Usually, pop artists championed by youth audiences have a relatively short shelf life. Their massive appeal often dissipates as that audience gets older, moves on and discovers different artistic interests while the next generation of pop enthusiasts flock to newer heroes. The few artists that maintain any lasting popularity often land in musical purgatory, fronting tours favoring older hits over newer records that are readily dismissed.

Swift broke free of that mold from the get-go. Each album outsold the last, her audience broadened to welcome new and longstanding fans and her reputation as a touring artist skyrocketed. She began big and got bigger. And bigger and bigger.

This is just a guess, but one reason for Swift’s unrelenting popularity has to be her shrewdness as a businesswoman. No female artist since Madonna has had such a hands-on approach to shaping and steering her career as Swift. But where Madonna’s image was often manufactured to be outrageous and controversial, Swift has luxuriated in relatability. A concert by Madonna possessed a danger level, a kind of dark circus, dance party vibe. Swift’s shows, perhaps borrowing from her initial country leanings, were more like a fanciful night out with your friends.

This summer, though, the better comparison to Swift isn’t Madonna, but Beyonce. She is also hitting the stadiums in the months ahead in a run that will include a show at Louisville’s L&N Federal Credit Union Stadium on July 17. Her Renaissance World Tour will present the only likely challenge to Swift for the top-grossing concert trek of the year. Both are likely to be winners, though.

In an April story for Bloomberg.com, Lucas Shaw wrote Swift and Beyonce may well end 2023 not only with the biggest tours of the year, but of all time. The piece also speculated, as have several articles and reviews, that both artists could gross as much as $1 billion with their current tours.

No wonder one of Swift’s fashion statements during her summer shows comes from a variation of a t-shirt she wore in the 2012 music video for the girls-night-out hit “22.” The garment was embossed with the credo “Not a lot going on at the moment.”

The new shirt worn by the 33-year old Swift onstage this summer offers an update as direct, concise and assured as Swift’s recent songs.

Its message: “A lot going on at the moment.”

Taylor Swift: The Era Tour

Where: Paycor Stadium, Cincinnati

When: June 30 and July 1 at 6:30 p.m.

Tickets: Both performances are sold out.

Other acts: Muna and Gracie Adams will open.