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Swifties and Deadheads — Separated at Birth? What the Eras Tour and Dead & Company’s Sphere Residency Share, as the Concert Phenomena of the Year
Taylor Swift's Eras Tour and Dead & Company's Sphere residency have more in common than meets the eye, as the two greatest concert phenomena of 2024.
Differently scaled as they are, Swift’s two-year Eras Tour and Dead & Company’s three-month residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere stand out out as the two most transfixing concert phenomena of the moment for similar reasons: because each gig in these respective runs is so stamped as its own individual, one-of-a-kind occasion that, for true fans, FOMO is literally a nightly thing. The band is very much playing live, contrary to Dave Grohl’s possibly jealous insinuations (I can attest to this, after standing yards away from the backing musicians on the floor at a couple of European shows), but it’s not as if they’re gonna go rogue and throw jazz chords into “Style.” On Friday night in Vegas, I saw how beautiful a segue it made for the band to go from the psychedelic “Drums”/”Space” interlude into an instrumental snippet of the Beatles’ “In My Life,” then a full-on cover of “Dear Prudence.” Were they thinking about how Prudence needed to be brought out of her spaciness back down to earth?
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