Taylor Swift has looked ahead to her upcoming ‘Eras’ tour and called the opportunity to have Paramore on the bill “a dream come true”.
The singer-songwriter and Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams have known each other since they were teenagers, growing up in the Nashville music scene.
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Swift reflected on that fact in a new interview with Billboard, telling the publication: “Having Paramore join me on tour is such an honour. We came up alongside each other as Nashville teenagers writing our own music, so it feels insanely special to kick off the tour together nearly two decades later.
“I just remember being constantly floored and inspired by their writing, originality, and artistic integrity. Hayley is such a riveting performer because she’s so multifaceted – bold and playful and ferocious and completely in command. It’s a dream come true to join forces like this.”
Taylor Swift CREDIT: Tommaso Boddi/WireImage
Williams also looked back on the two musicians’ musical youth in the same interview, remembering a time when 19-year-old Swift, then making country music, told the Paramore singer she “wanted to be like Carole King”. “I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s a crazy thing to say,’ you know? Because we were kids,” Williams explained.
“And I’ll be damned, this woman, she’s crossing genres and bleeding over into other aspects of pop culture, and she’s helping to shape it at the very least.”
Williams added that going on tour with Swift as her support act was “really huge”. “It’s a big deal that we even got thought of,” she said. “So I’m stoked. We can’t wait.”
Swift’s ‘The Eras’ tour will kick off in Glendale, Arizona in March, before moving across North America. Alongside Paramore, she will be joined by a raft of support acts, including Haim, Phoebe Bridgers, Muna, Beabadoobee, Girl In Red, Gracie Abrams and more.
Ticketing for the tour has been the subject of huge controversy, with multiple fans filing lawsuits against Ticketmaster. When tickets went on sale, fans reported outlandish wait times in Ticketmaster’s online queue, outages to the company’s website, and hyper-inflated prices on resale sites (including Ticketmaster’s own) before the sale even began.
Two class action lawsuits have been filed so far. The first claimed that the company had violated California’s state laws during its first ‘Verified Fan’ pre-sale and directly impacted Live Nation (Ticketmaster’s parent company) with accusations including fraud, price fixing, and antitrust violations. The second made many of the same accusations, alleging Ticketmaster “purposefully misled millions of fans into believing it would prevent bots and scalpers from participating in the pre-sales”.
Following the botched sale, Ticketmaster admitted it struggled with the “historically unprecedented demand” it faced from Swift’s fans, and scrapped the general sale entirely. Weeks later, it was reported that the company still had 170,000 tickets for Swift’s tour to sell.
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