Taylor Swift‘s upcoming 52-date The Eras Tour, set to finally launch this Friday (March 17), is quite simply one of the most-anticipated (and most in-demand) tours in the history of American popular music.
There’s a number of reasons for that: For one, it comes at the very peak of Swift’s popularity, with the superstar singer-songwriter just experiencing the best first-week numbers of her career for last October’s Midnights album, and spawning her longest-running Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit to date in its lead single “Anti-Hero.” For another, it comes after the longest road layoff of Swift’s illustrious touring career, with nearly five years — as well as six (!!) Swift full-length releases, and one global pandemic — having transpired since the Reputation Stadium Tour kicked off in May 2018.
But perhaps the biggest reason is that Swift now has a 17-year song catalog that’s the rival of any artist this century — and maybe even further back — which she plans on revisiting at length in the career-spanning tour. Swift’s career has now taken her all the way from wide-eyed teenage fairytales to 30-something late-night anxiety attacks, from country-folk ditties to moody synth-pop soundscapes, from the commercial peak of iTunes to the apex of the streaming age, from a time when she was defined by her radio smashes to a moment when her albums don’t even need conventional hit singles to earn rave reviews, win Grammys, and generally dominate the culture. And throughout the ups and downs of her career, her signature strength has remained her songwriting — a peerless ability to make the personal universal and the intimate massive, which has now inspired multiple generations of future stars, changing the course of pop music in the process.
So this week, we here at Billboard wanted to take a moment to look back at our favorites from the now hundreds of songs that make up her singular discography. Below are our 100 favorites: the delicate, the enchanted, the borderline-treacherous, and everything in between. Check it out below, and (hopefully) see you at the Eras Tour: It’s been waiting for us, and we’re ready for it.
