Scrolling through the ranking of the best -selling albums in the United States during the second week of January 2025 you can see a re-entry directly in second place, just behind the new best seller by Bad Bunny, “Debi Tirar Mas Fotos”. It is a live alive of Taylor Swift dating back to a few years ago, at the time present within the chart For only one week. “Lover: Live from Paris” is the partial report of the only date that Swift managed to make in support of “Lover” (his seventh album, released on August 23, 2019), before the pandemic came to block for several months L The entire live music sector, making the move and subsequent cancellation of the entire tour necessary.
On September 9, 2019 Taylor Swift performed at the Olympia in Paris, for an event one-off entitled “City of Lover”, a Release Party reserved for fans who managed to win the approximately two thousand tickets available thanks to a Online Contest which could be accessed by purchasing the disc. One of the rare recent cases in which it was possible to attend a set by Taylor Swift in such a collected space. We are light years distant from the mega-shows that will characterize the Eras Tour, and nobody at that moment could have yet been able to predict the customs clearance of American superstar at the indie people, an event that will occur after less than a year, thanks to the introspective bracetta Chamber -Pop “folklore”/”submarine”, made with the support of Aaron Dessner of the National.
A little too patinated and hyper-produced, “Lover” completed the lucky Electropop triptych inaugurated with “1989” (still its most successful album) and continued with “Reputation”. From the filming of the Parisian performance “City of Lover” will be taken, a television special broadcast in the United States by the ABC network on May 15, 2020, in the full pandemic, and made available from the next day on the Hulu and Disney+platforms. Compared to the original concert, it special He contained only eight of the sixteen songs performed, to be precise the eight songs extracted from “Lover”.
At the same time, the eight audio tracks were spread in the form of singles on streaming musical platforms, making them available as a real album only on Soundcloud. The day of Valentine's Day of 2023 will then be published “Lover: Live from Paris”, a double plating vinyl containing precisely those eight tracks, made available exclusively on webstore of the American singer -songwriter, quickly sold-out and entered the United States (a week of presence, at number 58, with about thirteen thousand copies sold), in Great Britain and Australia.
And here we are at current affairs. “Lover: Live from Paris” was republished on January 7, 2025 on webstore by Taylor Swift, again sold-out within a couple of hours. On January 16th the Standard Edition and three different Deluxe Edition A few hours were made available for the downloading. The three special editions were enriched by one Bonus track At the head, three other extracts of the album “Lover” registered live during the Eras Tour: “False God”, “I Think He Knows” and “Paper Rings”. The 161,000 physical copies sold in real time in the United States allowed the disc to return to the ranking by placing themselves in second position.
Designed for Super-Fan and Completeist Maniaci, the album still has the merit of fixing a swift snapshot a moment before its transmutation in universal icon, ultra-popular even beyond the colorful pop circuit.
The voice still does not have that depth that he will be able to reach in the following records, in particular in the recent “The Tortured Poets Department”, but in the live transposition the eight songs – almost all performed for the first time in front of the public – appear more effective than the Studio versions. The “Death by a Thousand Cuts” sequence-“Cornelia Street”-“The Man”, made in acoustic, only voice and guitar, in perfect solitude, is the most appreciable part of the set, and highlights all the well-known characteristics of the songwriting of the Swift, its innate narration capacity put to the service of a perfectly packaged product, as well as the intimate connection that always manages to establish with its fans, even more in such an intimate environment.
30/01/2025
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM