Taylor Swift Cancels All Live Performances This Year
Time feels pretty warped these days, and while the beginning of this quarantine was still only a little over a month ago, those days feel wildly removed from where we are today. No small part of that is how much we didn’t know, and how much we still don’t know, but also how much our information and understanding have shifted along the way. Remember when the first huge round of concert and festival cancellations and postponements started up? It didn’t even extend to the end of the spring, let alone break into the summer. Of course, more events have since been cancelled or moved, with many attempts to reschedule for what would, theoretically, be an insanely packed fall after all this is over.
More and more, however, it’s looking like that won’t be the case. Even if versions of normal life return intermittently, and even if we get to see some small club gigs sometime in 2020, the idea of attending a festival, or a major arena concert, is starting to seem increasingly distant. Earlier this week, news was going around that at least one expert’s opinion was that large-scale concerts (and similar events in the sporting world, etc.) wouldn’t be returning until fall 2021 at the earliest. Since then, the mayors of LA and NYC have started alluding to the idea that those kinds of large gatherings are most likely off the table for their cities for the entire rest of the year. Those early quarantine days do seem somehow innocent and naive compared to now. It’s certainly hard to imagine going from where we are today to giant festival crowds in a couple more months.
It looks like some of the people behind those big, thousands-strong gatherings are starting to grapple with this reality as well — including Taylor Swift. In a different version of 2020, Swift would’ve been bringing her Lover Fest tour across the world. Now, in an Instagram story, she’s announced that all of her 2020 live performances are cancelled. The US and Brazil legs will be rescheduled for 2021.
Perhaps, at this point, this is unsurprising. While it was nice to have these things to look forward to on the horizon, it’d take some kind of miracle for a concert the size of a Taylor Swift show to be safe by the end of 2020. We’re probably going to hear a lot more announcements like this soon enough. You can read Swift’s whole post below.