Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour came to an end last night after nearly two years. If you live with a tween, you already knew this. I do not live with a tween, and though I count myself among Swift’s most casual faction of fans, I only knew last night was the final show because my friends have tweens whom I follow on Instagram, and one of them posted about it.
My fearless leader Dustin lives with tweens—two of them, in fact—but he says they didn’t really care about the tour’s end. “I don’t think they knew,” were his exact words. “They still love Swift, but have also kind of moved on. Their favorites right now are Gracie Abrams (who I love),” this is in keeping with what I understand to be Dustin’s musical taste (sad), “And someone named Tate McRae.” I’d never heard of Tate McRae before this conversation, but a cursory Google search tells me she’s Canadian, and a brief glimpse at her Instagram profile tells me that the official Diet Coke account follows her, so, sounds like my kinda girl.
Gracie Abrams, though, I’ve heard of. The tweens belonging to my friends and the tweens belonging to Dustin have Gracie Abrams in common. Forget Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish—hell, forget Taylor Swift—it’s all Gracie Abrams all the time for the tweens, and the tweens, like it or not, run pop music.
The 25-year-old daughter of director J.J. Abrams, Gracie Abrams had a handful of singles and EPs before last year when she released the full-length album Good Riddance. Then she was featured on a Noah Kahan song, which is basically the seal of approval from the president of the Sad Music Society. And it worked, because flash forward to June of this year, and she’s releasing a studio album, The Secret of Us, with Taylor Swift featured on the title track, which earned them a 2025 Grammy nom for best collaboration.
Swift’s influence is all over the album. “Swift and Abrams wrote ‘Us’ together with producer and frequent collaborator Aaron Dessner, who helmed production on the record alongside Jack Antonoff,” writes Rolling Stone. Abrams’s style, in general, reminds me of early, acoustic, writing-in-my-diary Swift. Musically, it’s dripping with intense emotion, and lyrically, it’s confessional as hell. It’s that confessional quality that I think has been lost in Swift’s recent work, like The Tortured Poet’s Department, which is so laden with metaphor and allusion that it can be difficult at times to understand what’s being sung about. The more mature Swift gets, the less she lets us in. Songs like “The Bolter” are clearly self-reflective, but we’re kept at arm’s length lyrically with the pronouns “she” and “her.” Compare that to one of her earliest hits, “Tim McGraw,” which uses “I” and “me” pronouns, and you have a classic case of a pop star grown-up.
Swift is about to turn 35, and while that’s not particularly old by any measure, she might be starting to lose her connection to the tweens. She’s been doing this for a long time, after all. About 20 years, in fact—her first album came out when she was 16. The Eras Tour was a monolithic feat; between it, the rerecordings (which she’s not even done with), and the Travis Kelce of it all, most of us are feeling oversaturated with Taylor Swift and hoping she takes a long break after this.
Gracie Abrams, on the other hand, is right in that sweet spot: young enough to speak to the tweens, old enough to appeal to the rest of us, and new enough that we aren’t bored of her yet. Swift was smart to take her under her wing and usher her into her place, but those are big shoes to fill. It’s yet to be determined if Abrams has the chops to do it on her own (nepotism aside), or if it was just a case of right place, right time.