Gracie Abrams is just like the rest of us — not quite ready to say goodbye to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
Abrams, 25, who served again as a guest performer during Swift’s final tour show at BC Place in Vancouver, Canada, on Sunday, December 8, took to the stage with a piece of paper prior to her final performance.
Reading a heartfelt speech to the crowd, which was captured by a fan and posted via TikTok that evening, Abrams said she was “not ready for it to be over,” before paying tribute to the profound effect Swift, 34, has had on her life.
“Like all of you, I [was] brought up with Taylor’s songs,” Abrams, dressed in an angelic white gown, began. “Magically, needing a moment in my life that I didn’t think anyone else could understand or know or ached or yearned or loved or lost, and yet she did. How are we supposed to have the words for it? We don’t yet. But I do know that we have each other, thanks to Taylor, her music, her generosity, her curiosity, her wild and unparalleled pen, her super power of seeing into our lives and creating soundtracks for every single formative moment we’ve had and that we will have.”
At one stage, Abrams, who performed a duet with Swift during the Saturday, December 7, show performed in Vancouver, became emotional with her voice breaking. The musician, however, pushed on, telling the crowd that her night’s mission was clear.
“We are all here to remind her how deeply she’s touched us,” Abrams continued. “How much we appreciate every single tiny detail that she dreams up to delight us and to thank her, from the bottom of our hearts, for giving us the time of our lives.”
Swift embarked on the Eras Tour in Glendale, Arizona, in March 2023, performing throughout the United States until August 2023. She then embarked on the international leg of her tour, dropping into South America, Asia, Australia and Europe between November 2023 and August.
In October, Swift returned to North America for a handful of final shows in the U.S. and Canada.
Abrams was a self-proclaimed Swifite prior to forming a friendship with Swift, telling Vanity Fair in a July 2023 profile that, “every formative memory in my life is paired with a Taylor Swift song that helped me get through.”
Shortly before the pair met, Abrams got a call from an unknown number inviting her to Swift’s birthday party. She immediately called a mutual producer to confirm the digits belonged to Swift before replying in an effort to avoid getting her hopes up if it wasn’t the pop star.
Swift then invited Abrams to be one of the opening acts on the Eras Tour.
“[It was] the best experience of my life,” Abrams gushed of the concerts during a December 2023 interview with Variety. “To have that become a part of my weekly routine for four months straight has bled into kind of all ways of my life, not just how joyful I feel internally, but the songs that we’ve been making.”
In June, Swift confirmed that the tour would come to an end in December, calling the venture “the most exhausting, all-encompassing, but most joyful, most rewarding, most wonderful thing that has ever happened in my life.”
