Lover Fest was a planned concert tour by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, who embarked on it to support her seventh studio album, Lover (2019). It was scheduled to begin in Werchter, Belgium, on June 20, 2020, and to conclude on August 1, 2020 in Foxborough, Massachusetts, with a total of 16 shows across three continents, including 12 festival stops. The tour would have marked Swift's first festival tour.
The specifics regarding the duration and setlist of each show were not disclosed. However, it was speculated that the setlist might have been similar to the one performed at her City of Lover concert in Paris, the only concert held for Lover prior to the planned tour.[1]
Background
Swift announced the tour shortly after releasing Lover (2019). She expressed in an interview that she did not want to keep releasing albums and going on tour in order to promote them.[2] Because her mother had cancer at the time, Swift did not want to be away from home for a prolonged period of time.[3]
Swift announced the US dates in September 2019, and international dates were announced shortly after.[4][5] The Lover Fest West stop was the first scheduled event at the SoFi Stadium, and would have made Swift the first woman to open an NFL stadium.[6] Unlike her previous tours, Lover Fest focused on festival performances, including a scheduled headlining performance at the 2020 Glastonbury Festival, alongside Kendrick Lamar and Paul McCartney.[7] Following the cancellation of the 2020 festival, Lamar and McCartney appeared as headliners for the 2022 festival.[8] In the time since, she released two studio albums, Folklore (2020) and Evermore (2020), Though an offer was also extended to Swift, she did not perform at the 2022 festival, citing her focus on her album re-recording project.[9] The project comprises six re-recorded albums, with Swift already releasing the first two, Fearless (Taylor's Version) and Red (Taylor's Version), in 2021.
Cancellation
In April 2020, some of the dates got cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the pandemic, Swift announced that she would do the tour in 2021 instead.[10] On February 26, 2021, she announced that the tour was cancelled completely.[11][12] In 2023, Swift embarked on the all-stadium The Eras Tour.[13][14] As the Eras Tour was designed to support all her studio albums, Lover was included as the first act of the tour.[15]
