The Who's Pete Townshend Has High Praise for Taylor Swift

The legendary guitarist applauded Swift's live concerts.

By Allison Schonter

Taylor Swift is coming off a record-setting year that saw her reach billionaire status, be named Time Magazine's 2023 Person of the Year, check two more albums off her masters re-releases, and more — and now she can add high praise from a legendary musician to her ever-growing list of accolades. In a recent discussion with ComicBook.com, The Who's Pete Townsend had nothing but praise for Swift as he discussed the state of the live music industry, crediting the singer's record-breaking The Eras Tour for creating "a place where people feel really, really, really safe."

"I think what's happening with the Taylor Swift events, for example, she's created a place where people feel really, really, really safe," Townsend explained as he spoke to the outlet about his new graphic novel Life House. "And what I think was happening in the sixties – the late sixties, early seventies – was a discovery that it was safe to blend a music event, to allow yourself to unfold, to relax into the mood of the event. It could be that it was heavy music like Led Zeppelin, or parts of what The Who were doing. But it could also be the gentleness of great R&B like Sly and the Family Stone, but also more gentle music like Joni Mitchell, like Crosby Stills and Nash. There was a cross-section of music which, brought together in festival events, had the effect of making people feel together."

Marking the singer's sixth concert tour, and her most expansive tour yet, The Eras Tour is a celebration of Swift's record-setting career, featuring a setlist from her 10 studio albums. The tour, described by Rolling Stone as "a 3-hour career-spanning victory lap," kicked off on March 17, 2023, in Glendale, Arizona, and has since taken her across the U.S., Mexico, and South America. She also has dates set in the Asia-Pacific, Australia, Europe, and Canada throughout 2024.

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Not only has The Eras Tour proven so popular that scoring tickets to a show has proven extremely difficult (we all remember the Ticketmaster fiasco), but the tour has broken several records. During the first day of the US presale, The Eras Tour sold over 2.4 million tickets, the most sold by an artist in a single day. The tour has since gone on to cement itself as the highest-grossing tour of all time and the first to surpass $1 billion in revenue. The tour is so in demand that Swift resorted to bringing it to the big screen for all Swifties to enjoy, with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour opening in theaters in October. The film grossed 92 million in its opening weekend and $249 million in total, becoming the highest-grossing concert film of all time.

As for what's next for Swift? In addition to resuming her The Eras Tour later this year, the singer still has two more re-records to release – her 2006 self-titled debut and 2017's Reputation.

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