7/28/2023 An Enchanting Night: Taylor Swift Concert

Taylor Swift Concert Night with Justin L!

This night marked almost 10 months of anticipation for what I thought at the time would be one of the greatest moments of my life. Having been introduced to Taylor Swift for about a year, she quickly became my favorite artist of all time with her catchy tunes and wonderfully well-written lyrics. My Spotify 2023 Wrapped revealed that I was her top 0.1% fan with 24,259 minutes listened (37.58% of my total listening time in the year). I remember at one point in time I thought to myself that I should stop being obsessed and attempt to have greater diversity in my song choices. However, I soon discovered how pointless that was because literally every song sounded so inferior to Taylor Swift (in my opinion at that point in time).

 

Pre-concert shenanigans

We stood in line at 3:30PM to get into Levi's Stadium for the concert in 81°F heat. 

I waited like this for 1 hour 

 

Here are our Eras Tour fit! Justin wearing black and white for the Reputations album and me wearing maroon for the song Maroon in the Midnights album

 

Concert

The concert began and my screaming commenced. Ten minutes in, my voice was already hoarse in the middle of the second song. I decided to tune it down though, not because of my voice, but to not ruin the experience for mother and daughter sitting next to me with my out of tune yelling.

 

I'm not going to go through the whole concert, as it was just constant screaming (quieter) and jumping for three hours. Here are some highlights though:

I enjoyed Marjorie alot. It was a very moving song about the memories she had about her late grandma. 

Enchanted is my all-time favorite Taylor Swift song, so I was super hyped when she sung that. It really felt enchanting in that concert atmosphere with the brisk cold air and flashes of light purple in the audience coming from our light-up bracelets. It became even more magical when fireworks began shooting out in the background at the perfect time right before the bridge began. It turns out that, completely by coincidence, Six Flags behind the stadium shoots out fireworks out a night, and it just happened to be during Enchanted. I was so incredibly happy. As I reflected on this moment after the concert, I honestly could not think of a single moment in my life at that time where I had felt that much happiness. Truly, that must have been the peak amount of happiness chemcials flowing through my brain up until that moment. 

Here is me freaking out about fireworks and then screaming the Enchanted bridge

Post-concert chaos

The plan was to quickly exit and catch the Santa Clara light rail+Bart to where we parked our car. Things were going quite swimmingly at first: we had gotten out of the stadium pretty quickly, and it seemed like we were gonna be one of the first ones on the light rail. Unfortunately, I trolled and went on the wrong side of the road to line up, beginning the chaos. By the time we crossed back over to the right side, there was a ginourmous crowd of people waiting in an unmoving line. It seemed we would have to wait for an hour before being able to board, and my illogical anxieties of being straded was rising. Thankfully, our great friend Justin C. lived nearby and agreed to pick us up instead. 

Here we enter into my second great troll of the night. I was caught up in the excitement of the concert and took one too many videos of her singing. As a result, my phone was on less than 10% battery when the concert ended. I did at least have the foresight to write down Justin C's phone number on my arm just in case. We were just able to call him and coordinate a nearby park for him to pick us up at before my phone died. The walk there was simple as well, but we asked a stranger to double check our directions out of precaution. Thankfully, everything worked out pretty smoothly in the end, and we were able to find him at the park without needing to call him.