NEED TO KNOW
Disney+ released the first two episodes of The End of an Era on Dec. 12
The six-part docuseries gives fans an intimate look at Taylor Swift’s life during her history-making Eras Tour
In the first episodes, the pop icon gets emotional while talking about the Liverpool stabbing that killed three young fans
Taylor Swift is pulling back the curtain on her Eras Tour.
The pop icon made history with her 21-month-long global run that sold over $2 billion in tickets — double the sales of any other concert tour in history, The New York Times reported after her last show in December 2024. A year later, Swifties are reliving the magic through the singer’s Disney+ docuseries The End of an Era.
“My whole life I’ve been trying to study how do you not like just entertain people, but really transport them out of their problems, their life, their stresses? How do you really create a sense of escape?” Swift said during a December 2025 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter said she realized the impact her performances were having when she learned that fans were having “post-concert amnesia” and “joy blackouts.” Swift also told Colbert that she and her crew would also have “out of control, out of body experiences” while onstage.
Disney+ released the first two episodes of the six-episode series on Dec. 12, and the singer has already opened up about some of the highs and lows that defined the Eras Tour.
Here are the seven biggest bombshells from Taylor Swift’s The End of an Era — so far.
Swift described talking to Kelce as “a vitamin drip”
Disney+
Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift in Taylor Swift | The End of an Era.
In one intimate scene, Swift gave viewers a look into her sweet relationship with her fiancé, Travis Kelce.
The couple, who got engaged in August 2025, are chatting on the phone while she’s en route to a sold-out show in London. Though she confesses she wishes he could be there with her instead of at practice — even playfully asking him, “Why do you have to be in the NFL?” — they acknowledge that just talking to each other is enough to lift their spirits.
“Thanks for making my life better,” Kelce tells Swift. She responds, “I know … some people get a vitamin drip. I got this conversation.”
The Eras Tour was inspired by two “unpleasant” events
Disney+
Taylor Swift in Taylor Swift | The End of an Era.
Swift also revealed which two events “planted a little seed” that would eventually become the Eras Tour — and neither were particularly positive. “There were two main factors that culminated in the Eras tour,” she said at the beginning of The End of an Era. “Both of them are unpleasant.”
The first less-than-pleasant event was having the catalogue of her first six albums “sold out from under” her. That led Swift to decide to “defiantly” rerecord some music and revisit old collections of her songs.
She added that the second event was the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to her clinging to “songwriting as a life raft.”
“Folklore came out three or four months into the pandemic, we put out Evermore four months later,” Swift recalled. “I hadn’t toured in 5 years and the fans had created such demand for it.”
Swift acknowledged dodging a “massacre situation” in Vienna
Disney+
Taylor Swift in Taylor Swift | The End of an Era.
In The End of an Era, the singer discussed the emotional aftermath from the August 2024 terror plot that the CIA said was meant to kill “tens of thousands” of fans at her Vienna show. Three men were arrested in connection with the plot.
Swift canceled three of her shows in Austria’s capital city, and said it felt like she was “skating on thin ice” ahead of her first post-terror threat concert in London.
“We’ve had a series of very violent, scary things happen to the tour,” she said in the docuseries. “We dodged, like, a massacre situation. And so I’ve just been kind of all over the place … being like afraid that something’s gonna happen to your fans at any moment, this is a new challenge.”
The singer also told her mom, Andrea Swift, that she felt “twitchy and fidgety” before the show and noted that she wanted to keep “all of the nerves” she had away from her fans.
She cried over the three fans who were killed at a Swift-themed dance class
Courtesy of Merseyside Police
Elsie Dot Stancombe, Bebe King and Alice Dasilva Aguiar
Swift also opened up about one of the tour’s most heartbreaking events: the Liverpool stabbings.
“There was this horrible attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party, and it was little kids,” she said in the docuseries, growing emotional. “I have a hard time explaining it.”
On July 29, 2024, three young girls — 7-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, 9-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar and 6-year-old Bebe King — were stabbed to death during a Swift-themed dance and yoga class in Liverpool. Swift talked about meeting the victims’ families before her five shows in London.
“I’m gonna meet some of these families tonight and put on a pop concert, you know?” she said through tears. “I’m not gonna do this. I’m gonna be smiling. So any of this gets out of the way before you ever go on stage.”
In one vulnerable scene, Swift breaks down in her dressing room after speaking with one of the families while wearing her orange “The Man” jacket and boots. Andrea attempts to comfort her, saying, “I know you helped them. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I know you helped them.”
Swift gave her backup dancers six-figure bonuses
Disney+
Taylor Swift ‘s backup dancers in Taylor Swift | The End of an Era.
Episode 2 of The End of an Era showed Swift’s backup dancers breaking down into tears after she handed them each a six-figure bonus check. Dancer Kameron Saunders read the handwritten note she had attached out loud.
“Dearest Kam, we’ve traveled the world like we set out to do, we’ve dazzled the crowds, but we’ve missed family, too,” he recited. “My gratitude doesn’t come from a bank, but here’s [bleeped out] dollars just to say thanks.”
PEOPLE confirmed in December 2024 that Swift distributed a total of $197 million in bonuses to all those who worked on her tour.
She joked about having “a mental breakdown” while singing one particular song
Erika Goldring/TAS24/Getty
Taylor Swift performs onstage during “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour” on October 25, 2024 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
While rehearsing The Tortured Poets Department segment of her tour, Swift admitted that there was one song she might have a hard time singing live: “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”
After singing a few lines from the track, she joked that she was “gonna have a mental breakdown,” adding, “It’s gonna be so fun.”
Swift previously opened up about the song’s meaning in Amazon Music’s track-by-track experience for the album and revealed that she wrote it when she “felt bitter” about how society treats artists.
“What do we do to our writers, and our artists, and our creatives? We put them through hell,” she explained, per Variety. “We watch what they create, then we judge it. We love to watch artists in pain, often to the point where I think sometimes as a society we provoke that pain and we just watch what happens.”
Swift gave her crew an emotional speech before her final show
Disney+
‘Taylor Swift | The End of an Era’.
Before the final concert of the Eras Tour in Vancouver, Swift gathered her team into a huddle for one last pep talk. And what she said drove them all to tears.
“I think about the moment that you decided that dancing was your calling and the moment that you first saw a band and thought, ‘Man, I wanna save up for an instrument,’ ” Swift said. “Every single one of us has picked professions that, categorically, people, for the majority of the time, they tell you you shouldn’t do it.”
She continued, “And so I’ll see you getting rejected, not getting the job, not getting the part, not getting the solo. I’ll see all of those things that happened all along the way — the doors that were shut, the doors that were open, the windows you pried open.”
Swift, getting emotional, went on to say that though everyone has talked about the Eras Tour as a phenomenon where everything just “fell into place,” she has a different viewpoint.
“I just want every single one of you to know that I, in no way, shape or form, look at this as the pieces just falling into place,” she concluded. “You put the pieces where they are. This is the biggest challenge any of us have ever done. Tonight, we complete that challenge.”
Read the original article on People