Taylor Swift celebrates music and friendship at the Linc

Nobody bonds with their audience like Taylor Swift, and on Friday night in South Philadelphia, the 25-year-old pop superstar from Wyomissing spent more than two hours connecting with 50,000 of her closest fans in the first of back-to-back sellout shows at Lincoln Financial Field. This is the tour for 1989. That's the 2014 album, named for the year of her birth, that is closing in on an astonishing five million copies sold in the United States. It has completed Swift's trajectory from teenage country singer to unabashed pop artist. She has left curly-haired precociousness behind ind is now finding herself in the big city, and on the biggest stage.

To make that theme clear, Swift began with "Welcome to New York," the album opener that celebrates reinvention with synth-pop buoyancy. "Everybody here was someone else before," she sang, as she moved about with a dozen male dancers, lit to appear as if they were stuck in black and white, while the singer alone came of age in living color.

Talking to an overwhelmingly female crowd - ranging from first graders to millennials who have grown up with Swift (she released her first single, "Tim McGraw," in 2006) - Swift made much of her roots in Reading. "I remember when I was a little kid and my father would watch Eagles games on TV," she said. ". . . And here I am, playing a concert in a football stadium."

This is actually the third consecutive tour Swift has played the Linc, and she grows ever more confident in translating her emotionally detailed songs to the most oversized of stages.

The 1989 tour includes all the apparently necessary elements of a stadium tour. There were fireworks, and a runway that rose high to give faraway fans a better look.

By my count there were 10 costume changes, including a Joan Jett-ish leather outfit for the aggressive new single "Bad Blood." That number felt over-choreographed and stilted during the leisurely paced show. Swift swiftly recovered with a rocked-out recast of her 2012 hit "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," in which she turned up her electric guitar.

Swift, who sang capably as well as playing keyboards and guitar, served up a pair of surprises. Mid-show, she brought out the Los Angeles band Echosmith and sang their hit "Cool Kids" with them. And for "Style," the disco-flavored 1989 tune that's one of her many impressive examples of top-notch song craft (the brilliantly catchy "Blank Space" and the delicate "Clean," the latter written with British songwriter Imogen Heap, are two others), she welcomed two besties to walk the runway with her: model Cara Delevingne and actress Mariska Hargitay.

All those costume changes were made possible by between-song clips shown on three giant video screens. They featured Swift's celebrity friends - Girls star Lena Dunham, model Karlie Kloss, the sisters of pop band Haim - talking about feminism, and love, and what it's really like to hang out with Taylor.

There were too many of the prerecorded segments, and the show dragged a bit as chaperones started to wonder: When is she going to do "Shake It Off," already? (It was the final song of the night, with the Linc bouncing along to a dance beat synchronized with lights generated by wristbands given out to fans as "a gift from Taylor.")

But as Swift's BFFs slowed momentum, they also underscored the overriding idea: that making your way in the world is complicated and difficult, and would be that much harder without music and friendship. And while Swift is famous for writing songs about relationships that didn't work, she wants you to know she's never ever planning to break up with her fans.

"Music can be the only thing we have that understands us at our low points," the singer said, throwing out a lifeline while floating above the crowd. "Maybe you've lost someone you never thought you would. Maybe you've lost yourself; that's the worst."

And maybe by listening to the songs of Taylor Swift, you can find your way back.

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