The Best Concerts of 2024

variety.com:

frilliest tour of all time, and that every night on the 149-concert road show felt as spectacular as any actual grand finale could.

Of course, the “secret songs” segment made each date on the epic tour feel deeply individual, however much Swift spent the other 95% of these nights giving crowds the same ecstatic joy-bomb experience.

Swift said 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 feel about tonight, so I decided to go back to the beginning.” That turned out to be a reprise of one of her very earliest, most innocent-sounding, “just a girl” songs, “A Place in This World,” which was mashed up with “New Romantics,” one of her most knowing songs — a four-minute encapsulation of youthful naivete and lovingly cynical maturity that made not just the tour but her entire life feel like one unbroken era, however much she’d broken it all up for thematic setlist purposes.

Whether you’re one of her thirtysomething contemporaries, a fresh teen fan or a proud #SwiftieOverFifty, the Eras Tour was bound to made you reflect on the segmentation of your own life… when the 210 minutes’ worth of joybombs weren’t just blowing up your cerebral cortex. (Read our original review here.) —Chris Willman It was subtle enough, but if the setlists for Springsteen’s 2024 shows had a single theme, it was the thin veil between life and death, and how the losses we suffer make each minute on earth all the more precious.