Taylor Swift could ‘barely’ lift her arms after Eras tour shows

Taylor Swift performs onstage during The Eras Tour at BC Place in Vancouver, British Columbia. Photo / Getty Images

Taylor Swift could “barely” lift her arms or walk during her downtime on the Eras Tour.

The 35-year-old singer performed for over three hours a night during her 149 shows, which took place around the world between March 2023 and December 2024, and admitted she was able to write her new album The Life of a Showgirl in her spare time because physical exhaustion left her unable to do much else.

Speaking to Scott Mills on the BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show, she said: “I do love baking, I love cooking, I love just any kind of food related hobbies. And I didn’t really have very many hobbies when I was on The Eras Tour because I could barely lift my arms or walk.

“I just wrote songs. You don’t really need to be able to like, you know, like lift your arms or be able to walk, you know. There’s so much exhaustive pain.”

The Fate of Ophelia singer found working on the album in Sweden during her breaks gave her the creative satisfaction she needed to ignore how exhausted she felt and plough on with the tour.

She said: “I think the energy that I felt on that tour, it was so big and infectious, and I wrote most of this while I was on that tour. So it’s like I would go from three shows in a stadium, fly to Sweden, fly back to the tour, fly to Sweden.

“And it sounds like sort of an impossible feat or a ridiculous challenge to take on, but at that point in the tour, I was so physically exhausted that I kind of needed to get back in that creative space and that fuelled me past physical exhaustion.”

Swift admitted there were times when it felt like the “really complex” concerts were something she needed to “survive”.

She said: “Really, every time I would just collapse into bed at night after the show, I’d just be like, I take the longest, deepest sigh of just like, we managed to do it again.

“It’s a show you have to like survive. Every now and then I’m like ‘We survived it again.’ ”