What you need to know
Taylor Swift was emotional at the final show of her Ellas tour, and there’s a reason why.
“I just had a moment,” Swift, 36, tearfully struggled during her final performance in Toronto in November 2024, after performing “Marjorie,” a song she wrote for her late grandmother.
In a new episode of the Disney+ docuseries Taylor Swift: The End of an Era, the pop superstar reveals that she felt “kind of embarrassed” about the plumbing work, but was also emotional because of the speech her backup singer Camilla Marshall gave before the show about the loss of her mother.
“I got emotional. I felt like an idiot,” Swift told her brother Austin in the car after the show.
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While Austin, 33, assured her brother that her tears were “the best moment,” Swift felt otherwise, saying, “I just couldn’t get the words together, Austin. That was kind of embarrassing. But I’m glad you said that. But you’re such a supportive person.”
The “Oparite” singer went on to explain that she was moved by Marshall’s speech earlier that night, in which she said she had to balance her feelings of pure joy on the Elas tour with the heartbreak of her mother’s passing in 2021.
“What bothered me was that Camila gave a speech before the show about how her mother passed away, and she just said how heartbreaking it was that her mother couldn’t see Ellath on tour and she couldn’t see herself do this tour,” Swift said. “And I was thinking about it all night. And I knew that, and we always had eye contact with ‘Marjorie,’ me and Camila, because of her mom.”
Swift went on to say that Marshall’s talk about her loss helped put a positive perspective on things, and that she was grateful that her parents, Scott and Andrea, came to see her on tour.
“It put it into perspective, like the fact that my mom could see it, Travis could see it, and my dad could see it. And that’s what shocked me,” she told her brother. “That had a big impact on me.”
At that point, Scott called and Swift put Scott on speakerphone in her car.
“Oh my god, it was unreal. It was unbelievable,” he told his daughter, and Andrea added, “It really was. And I think you have every right to be emotional, because the fact that this was the dream tour of your life should hit you, honey.”
Swift admitted that it’s taking a toll on her, saying, “I never thought we’d be this good…It’s really crazy that this whole thing happened and we all ended up going through it together.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Andrea spoke about Marjorie’s career as an opera singer and how it prepared her to handle her daughter’s career.
“I had a great relationship with my mom because she loved singing, she loved performing, and I was very aware that she was someone that people loved,” she said. “I think we’re probably better prepared than ever to have a child like Taylor, who wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps.”
Marjorie passed away in 2003, before Swift achieved success as a singer-songwriter. The star dedicated “Marjorie” to her grandmother as a song on her 2020 album Evermore, and performed it every night on her Elas tour.
