She zigs and zags through the chronology with giddy abandon, opening with the unabashed romanticism of 2019’s Lover, before delving into her back catalogue for the country hits of Fearless and her pop transformation on Red.
Every moment gets its own look. The Man, a song about restrictive gender stereotypes, is performed inside an elaborate set of office cubicles and typewriters. The spiky and sarcastic Look What You Made Me Do sees dancers trapped in glass boxes, each imitating a different look from Swift’s 19-year career. And Blank Space is like a live action Tron, with neon bicycles circling the stage.
But for her masterpiece, All Too Well, Swift stands alone on a raised platform for 10 minutes, armed only with her guitar and a red-black ombre coat.
Taken from 2012’s Red Album, the song is a 10-minute evisceration of an ex-boyfriend (believed to be actor Jake Gyllenhaal) that contains some of her most scathing and desolate lyrics.
She sings it with faded anger and bittersweet tenderness, the crowd joining sympathetically on the pivotal line: “You call me up again just to break me like a promise / So casually cruel in the name of being honest.”
The song is an emotional highlight, simultaneously specific and universal, a characteristic that’s endeared her to female fans in particular.
It’s one of several songs in Edinburgh that elicits tears from the audience.
But only one prompts a proposal.