Wembley Stadium, 24 June 2024:

Travis Kelce surprises fans as a backup dancer during Taylor Swift’s I Can Do It With a Broken Heart. The crowd erupts, fan screams hit new decibel levels, and one woman stops singing—overcome with sobs.

As she has so many times tonight, Swift pauses to smile at the crowd. As if she hasn’t seen this about 1,000 times before. As if she’s taking it all in, and storing up the memory for later. My friend elbows me. ‘Can you even imagine what it’s like to be her right now?’

So surreal that it’s unimaginable. Like the expression of her wildest, most outrageous dreams, I’m sure. Since embarking on the Eras Tour in 2023, Swift’s life must have become a cocktail of experiences and emotions few people alive could understand. The adulation, the gruelling shows, the travel, the economic impact – all of it exhausting and energising, heady and bizarre.

By the time the tour wrapped in Vancouver in early December, Swift had performed to more than 10 million attendees and made more than $2 billion in ticket sales – more than twice as much as the second all-time highest-grossing tour. She played 149 shows in 21 countries and released a double album (The Tortured Poets Department) along the way. Her only peer at the tippy-top of the music industry is Beyoncé, and both Swift and Beyoncé reject comparison. Time Magazine may have named President-elect Donald Trump its person of the year, but the editors got it wrong. That title belongs to Taylor Swift.

Which raises the question: When you’re Taylor Swift and you’ve achieved so much, where can you go from here?

Extending and sustaining Eras Tour levels of activity and visibility for any longer simply wasn’t feasible. But Swift’s ambition, her prolific level of creative output and her prodigious work ethic suggest she isn’t likely to retire to a private island. Not for long, anyway.

Swifties are buzzing about Reputation (Taylor’s Version)—a re-recorded album with bonus tracks that would bring Swift closer to completing her Big Machine re-recordings.

Fans anticipate Reputation (Taylor’s Version) and an Eras Tour documentary, with behind-the-scenes footage likely set for a standalone release.

Or she might take her filmmaking into a more narrative direction. In 2022 she sold a script to Searchlight Pictures, a film studio. She’s directed enough music videos (and a short film, for All Too Well) that she could feel ready for something bigger. At the Toronto Film Festival in 2022, she said she’s invested in telling ‘human stories about human emotion’ and, ‘I think that I’m at a place now where the next baby step is not a baby step. It would be committing to making a film.’

But what about the theatre?

In May 2024, Swift trademarked the term, ‘Female Rage: The Musical’, which she first used to describe the Tortured Poets section of the Eras Tour setlist during her Paris shows. Somehow producing a stage show that could only ever play to one theatre’s worth of ticket holders at a time seems like one of the less plausible pathways ahead for Swift.

Some speculate Swift might take a break after dominating global culture, giving her and Kelce a chance to enjoy time in the same city. With lyrics hinting at laid-back vibes, now could be the perfect moment to slow down and explore new hobbies.

Or not. I can’t imagine that someone with the motivation and determination to bring the Eras Tour to life and the stamina to sustain it across years and continents truly dreams about sitting on a front-porch swing, whether in Nashville or Kansas City.

Even on a well-earned break, Swift is likely crafting her next era. In her Eras Tour book, she wrote, “See you next era.” Whenever it comes, we’re ready.