She’s pulled off the biggest magical act of her career, but her next surprise trick might be to disappear

Like so many others, I’ve spent way too much of my life trying to analyze Taylor Swift. When a childhood friend played “Should’ve Said No” for me on the school bus in fourth grade, it kicked off 17 years of combing through the singer’s works for meaning. It began with searching her lyric booklets for hidden clues and has since evolved into studying her concert tour outfits to predict what rerecorded album she will release next. As a Taylor Swift fan, it’s easy to become obsessed with the puzzles and how they forecast her next move. But with the biggest success in her career thus far—her record-shattering Eras Tour—finally coming to a close, I’m realizing that Swift’s next chapter might not be so easy to predict. In fact, her next move might be to disappear from music entirely, at least for a bit.

This past weekend, I went to one of the final Eras Tour shows in Indianapolis. The energy was just as electric as when I first saw the concert a year and a half ago. The success of the Eras Tour has been covered ad nauseam—how it boosted local economies, influenced other stars’ touring strategies, brought on a legal case against ticket-distributing monopolies, and more. But while you might expect audiences to have Taylor fatigue, the energy at Lucas Oil Stadium on Friday night was unmatched. A record-setting 69,000 fans gathered to see the singer as she kicked off her final trio of U.S. shows, and all of them seemed hyped to be there.

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I can still remember when Swift first announced the Eras Tour, kicking off my frantic attempt to score tickets. I suspected that this would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and that hunch was right. Each time I saw the show, I was amazed by the hordes of fans in elaborate outfits, their ages ranging across decades, trading friendship bracelets and sharing a sense of genuine love. Now, I find myself lucky enough to have attended the show twice.Still, despite my excitement, it was hard not to feel like this is a final bow of sorts for Swift. “We got to bring this tour in front of the most dedicated, passionate, enthusiastic, excitable, loud fans,” she told the crowd that night. “So we decided that the very last U.S. city on the Eras Tour would, in fact, be right here in Indianapolis, Indiana. And I can already tell we made the best decision possible.”

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Since March 2023, Swift has managed to run her show like clockwork. But she is not the same woman she was when she started the Eras Tour almost two years ago. Currently, Swift finds herself the only artist to have won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year four times, the only artist to have sold over $1 billion in concert sales from a single tour, and the only artist to have seven albums sell over one million copies in a single week. She has perhaps the most supportive partner she’s ever had, Travis Kelce, who’s unafraid to join her onstage or tell journalists which of her songs are his favorites. Businesswise, she started quietly working on her directorial film debut, from a screenplay she wrote herself, while also unveiling a new book-publishing company called Taylor Swift Publications. Even politically, she’s taken more risks, having put her support behind Kamala Harris—her first full-fledged public endorsement of a presidential nominee since she voiced her support of President Joe Biden in a V Magazine interview and baked Biden-Harris cookies back in 2020.

When Swift first announced the Eras Tour, many commented on the surprising format. It’s not often that musicians do a tour highlighting their various releases unless they’re embarking on a retirement tour or a Las Vegas residency. For Swift to revisit her former records at the top of her critical and commercial game was a twist, but one that obviously paid off in the long run. As Swift told the crowd at Indianapolis, she envisioned this tour as a way to please her longtime fans, while also inviting in the new ones. While some followers have been coming to Swift’s shows for years, she envisioned the Eras Tour as a way for everyone to catch up.

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Now, with millions celebrating almost two decades of musical output, it feels like Swift is ready to let that legacy simmer. For the past two years, she’s had the heat turned all the way up, but once the Eras Tour wraps and she releases the “Taylor’s Version” of Reputation and her debut, I think her biggest surprise yet would be to step back—without any sort of Easter egg.

This year, Swift received some flak when her team released various acoustic versions and remixes of songs from her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, seemingly as a way to keep that record at number one and prevent other artists from reaching the top of the chart. Throughout her career, Swift’s relationships with fellow artists have often been examined, and as she sang herself on “Nothing New,” she’s often feared that young starlets would eventually replace her. “And will you still want me when I’m nothing new?” she asks on the Red vault track.

But when choosing her openers for Eras, Swift notably picked a number of rising stars, like Sabrina Carpenter, Gracie Abrams, and Girl in Red, whose careers have all considerably blown up since, in part thanks to Swift’s endorsement. For Abrams’s second album, Swift even collaborated on one of the tracks, titled “Us,” which Abrams called a “dream” to make when she opened for the singer in Indianapolis. Clearly, with age and wisdom, Swift has gotten more comfortable in herself and her position, and more willing to champion new artists. Now, maybe she’s ready to take a pause and let these newcomers shine.