The wait is almost over, Swifties. Taylor Swift’s ‘The Eras Tour’ arrival in South Philly is just days away

Look out, Philadelphia.

There’s a giant pop star headed your way. An oversize attraction who, in her own words, is like “a monster on the hill, too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city.”

That’s right: The ginormous visitor is Taylor Swift, coming back to the sports complex in South Philadelphia. The same one where she first performed when she was 12, singing the national anthem at a Sixers game in 2002.

This time, she arrives with her “Eras Tour,” an epic production that runs over three hours.

She takes over Lincoln Financial Field for three nights beginning May 12. Phoebe Bridgers opens. Bridgers will be preceded by Gayle on May 12 and May 13 and Gracie Abrams on May 14.

The tour is only the second three-night stand in the stadium’s 20-year history. (Bruce Springsteen did three shows in 2003, but not on consecutive dates.) The “Eras” shows will be Swift’s first in Philly since she played two nights at the Linc in 2018.

Due to the pandemic, Swift never toured for her 2019 album Lover, but has been impressively industrious in the interim.

In fact, she’s put out so much music that a tour that takes a wide-angle view of her career — rather than focusing on one album — became a necessity.

Since Lover, Swift has put out three more full-length albums of new music.

During lockdown in 2020, Swift went Cottagecore, surprise releasing the homespun Folklore and Evermore. Each featured members of the National and drew her closer to a DIY aesthetic than anything she’d previously done.

She’s kept up that collaboration, cowriting and singing “The Alcott” on the new National album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein. By so doing, she could be taking further revenge on ex-boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal, the (alleged) recipient of her mockery in her 2012 hit “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” for his pretentious taste in indie music.

But I digress. Last year, she released Midnights, made with New Jersey super producer Jack Antonoff.

The low-key synth-pop record is self-reflective and anxiety-ridden. That’s particularly true on “Anti-Hero,” the song quoted above whose hook repeats: “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.” Rather than finding fault with flawed exes, the singer who says she gets “older but just never wiser” points a finger at herself for “covert narcissism I disguise as altruism.”

Self-criticism hasn’t dampened her popularity. “Eras Tour” ticket demand crashed Ticketmaster and led to Congressional hearings. She has three albums in the top ten, including the vinyl only Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions — the biggest selling Record Store Day release ever.

And “Anti-Hero,” despite its frank admission that “it must be exhausting” to keep up with her, topped “Shake It Off” as Swift’s longest running song on the Billboard charts.

It probably also offers her some satisfaction that “Anti-Hero” has been more of a smash than “Lavender Haze,” the love song presumably about her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn which, Swift watchers believe, has come to an end. The latest evidence is that this past week Swift deleted a 2022 Instagram talking about Alwyn as the inspiration for“Lavender.”

Since she last played the Linc, Swift also lost control over the master recordings of her first six albums, leading her to re-record both Fearless (which originally came out in 2008) and Red (2012).

The latter put a spotlight on the 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” the epic breakup saga also inspired by Gyllenhaal. It will surely be a highlight of the “Eras” shows at the Linc.

There is another consequential Swift shift since the singer who summered in Stone Harbor while growing up in Berks County played South Philly in 2018.

Back then, Swift was cautious politically, tuned into advisers like her father, Scott, who in Lana Wilson’s Netflix Swift doc Miss Americana, suggests she keep quiet to not risk alienating her massive fan base.

» READ MORE: Taylor Swift and the cost of speaking out on politics, or staying silent, in ‘Miss Americana’

Staying silent resulted in her being lambasted by the left and appropriated by the right, including white supremacists. In October 2018, she voiced support for LGBTQ rights and Democratic candidates in Tennessee. Then-President Donald Trump said he liked her music “25% less.”

Swift has come a long way since her self-titled debut at 16. Since then, she’s managed the difficult trick of crossing over from country to pop while her audience has expanded and she’s won ever wider acclaim.

These days, even arbiters of cool like Pitchfork, who ignored her for a decade, have climbed on board, retroactively giving old albums high scores.

“We used to laugh when you went to review Taylor Swift concerts,” my neighbor said to me the other day. “Now we love her.”

Ten-album winning streaks are rare in pop music. That Swift has managed that evolution while growing up in public is no mean feat. Midnights isn’t Swift’s most consistent work, but it holds its own in her oeuvre, and she’s never released an absolute clunker.

My one quibble with the structure of the “Eras Tour” is there’s no designated section of the show for a bunch of songs from her debut album. Taylor Swift is not an “Era” apparently.

So those hoping to hear teenage heartbreak hits like “Picture To Burn” and “Teardrops On My Guitar” can only cross their fingers that they’ll turn up in the two-song surprise slot she makes room for every night.

There is hope. But I fear the odds are not good for the surprise song I really want to hear — “Tim McGraw” — since it was already played in the tour opener in March. The song named after the country star would be a sweet choice partly because the name resonates here. McGraw’s father, Tug, threw the World Series clinching pitch for the Phillies, across the street, at what was then Veterans Stadium in 1980.

It’s a brilliant miniature about music and memory that’s remarkable because it was the first single she ever released, yet prefigures themes in her music ever since.

It expertly evokes the way a song can take you back to a time and place — to where you heard your favorite Taylor Swift song, or that time she played it for you in a South Philly football stadium on a spring night in 2023.