What the Eras Tour Reveals About Vocal Stamina (and What Singers Can Learn From It)

If you’re a fan like me, you might have recently watched the Eras Tour docuseries on Disney+. I loved seeing the behind-the-scenes reality of what it actually takes to do three and a half hours of the Eras Tour, four nights a week, for months and months on end (like… 18 months?!). The scale of it is honestly hard to wrap my head around!

One moment that really stuck with me was in episode three, when Taylor Swift is working out with her trainer and says:

“I’ve never worked out this much in my life, it’s horrible. Six months ahead of my first rehearsal, I was running on the treadmill every single day at the tempo of the songs that I was playing, while singing them out loud.”

She wasn’t just training to sing—she was training to sing under the exact physical conditions the show would demand. THAT’S how you build stamina that actually translates onstage.

What I found myself wishing though, was that the docuseries went deeper into what it took vocally to sustain a tour like this.

In episode five, we see her rehearsing her acoustic set backstage with Gracie Abrams, and she very clearly has a nasty cold, you can hear it in her speaking voice and she says as much. And yet—they full-out sing the set anyway!! No marking here.

If my memory serves me correctly, she never cancelled a show due to sickness. And we all know that over the course of a tour this massive, she had to be battling exhaustion, illness, and maybe even vocal injury at some point. Because that’s just being human!!

So of course my brain goes straight to the questions:

• Who’s her laryngologist?
• What does her warm-up routine actually look like?
• When she gets sick (because let’s be real, you can’t just call out when you’re Taylor Swift), is she managing symptoms with steroids?
• Is she taking real vocal rest?

Knowing that she was flying to Sweden on her days off during the European leg of the tour to record The Life of a Showgirl tells me… probably not a ton of rest!!!!!

We also can’t talk about vocal sustainability without acknowledging that it’s highly likely some portions of the show are supported by sweetener tracks—pre-recorded vocals that she would sing on top of. That absolutely can ease some of the vocal burden of a 3+ hour show, but certainly not all of it.

That said—I recently revisited her final Eras Tour concert recording, and girlfriend is sounding very live on that opening number. I loved it.

The truth about long running shows:

Anyone who’s been in a long-running show will tell you that fairly quickly, your voice and body acclimate to the demands. Your voice can almost “lock in” and do exactly what it needs to do, sometimes with very little warm-up or prep.

But those same singers will also tell you that having the flexibility to sing anything else during—or immediately after—that run can be really difficult.

And that’s where cross-training becomes so important for long-term vocal health and skill. Not just being able to sing the show, but being able to sing beyond it.

It also cannot be overstated how crucial it is to have a strong voice team around you—teacher, laryngologist, SLP, coach, all of it. And just as importantly, a deep understanding of your own body and what your voice needs to perform sustainably.

The time to figure that out is in the weeks and months before a run starts—not scrambling for solutions when the first issue (and there will be issues!!) pops up.

You can land wherever you want on the topic of Taylor’s natural singing talent. But without question, she has proven herself to be one of our generation’s greatest singers when it comes to stamina, energy, consistency, and performance ability.

I’m truly in awe of her (and her invisible vocal team 😘)

Let me know if you’ve seen the docuseries, I’m curious what you think!!

💙 Chelsea Wilson