Taylor Swift’s Final Night of Eras Tour Is a Quintessential ‘Long Live’ Moment in Pop History’s Greatest Road Show: Concert Review

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The final night of Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour Sunday night in Vancouver was marked by no big announcements, no guests, no gimmicks, no frills — unless, of course, you take into account that this was the frilliest tour of all time, and that every night on the 149-concert road show felt as spectacular as any actual grand finale could.

That this really was it was almost incalculable, perhaps most of all to Swift, who started by saying “we are about to go on one last grand adventure together” and ended by finally thanking “every one of you for being part of the most thrilling chapter of my entire life to date — my beloved Eras Tour.” Her band had never vamped so long at the end of the closing “Karma” as it did Sunday, as Swift did her best to stretch her arms to include her entire coterie of dancers and singers in a group hug that seemed like it might add several extra minutes to the already three-hour-20-minute show, before going on to hug most of them individually.

But the true emotional climax on the third and final night of a BC Place stand might have come earlier, during the “secret songs” segment, when Swift veritably wrapped her arms around the audience by making them part of a mashup centered around “Long Live,” her salute to tours that actually last forever in memory — a fairly ancient song that she turned into an anthem just for the occasion, by changing the “end of a decade” line to “end of an era,” which brought down the house and threatened to become one of those Richter-scale moments the tour has become famous for.

Swift said that she’d “had so long to prepare for the end of this tour,” and was” trying to think about what songs really encapsulate how I.