Taylor Swift’s Tour Revives an Old Debate: When’s the Bathroom Break?

When do you use the bathroom during a three-hour-plus live music event you had to wage an epic battle to get tickets for? 

It’s a question weighing on attendees of Taylor Swift’s marathon Eras Tour concerts. After a presale that crashed Ticketmaster and left millions of fans empty-handed, the tour has spawned a cutthroat resale market where fans have faced staggering prices, canceled orders and fake tickets. The lucky ones who scored seats are now trading tips on Twitter and TikTok about opportune points during the hit-filled 44-song set list to take a bathroom break. Others are imploring their fellow Swifties to hold it so they don’t miss a moment of the summer’s biggest music event.

“I am going to be hydrating, and I have a small bladder,” said Emily Rose, 34, whose TikTok video asking Swifties what Eras tour song they would use as a bathroom break went viral. 

Swift’s set list is built on several songs plucked from each of her 10 albums and is largely unchanged for every show, which means fans can plan their bathroom strategies ahead of time. 

Rose, a podcaster from Montreal, said in her TikTok that she would use the 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” a fan favorite from Swift’s album “Red,” to hit the bathroom during the Aug. 8 show in Los Angeles. It’s an ideal bathroom break song, she said, because it’s not one of her favorites, lines would likely be shorter and it’s one of the singer’s longest hits. Her friends plan to go during the “Fearless” set—they didn’t become fans until “Red,” Swift’s fourth album, was released. 

Some of the comments Rose received in response to her video surprised her. “I had people writing messages saying getting a ticket was a privilege, and if I don’t understand that privilege I should give up that ticket because I don’t deserve to go,” Rose said. “It’s hard to know who’s joking, but based on the essays some people wrote me, some people were not.”

Others opted to stay for the whole show and simply avoid fluids altogether. Maddy Pritzl, 23, said she and her friend bought one bottle of water as a last resort for Swift’s second night at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass. 

“We honestly dehydrated,” Pritzl said. “My friend had gone the night before and was like, ‘I don’t want to miss anything.’”

The two used the portable toilets lining the parking lot outside the stadium before and after the show, which had no lines, she said, adding that they would do it all over again: “That purposeful dehydration saved us from missing out on anything.”

She said she learned her lesson at Swift’s “1989” tour, when she had to keep making bathroom trips during Haim’s opening act. She’s laid out pee break songs for other artists’ concerts like Phoebe Bridgers (“Kyoto”) and Lorde (most of the songs off “Solar Power”). On the Taylor Swift subreddit, there’s a long thread dedicated to brainstorming bathroom break strategies, where ideas range from “I plan on holding it in” to the minutes-long break between “Enchanted” and the beginning of the “Red” set. 

Even the pop culture blog No Guilt Fan Girl offered “All Too Well” and the surprise songs Swift plays each show as bathroom-break ideas in its concert guide for parents, though it noted that there is no truly ideal time to leave.

Fans of artists like the Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen, known for staying onstage for three or more hours at concerts, have confronted this question before. Online, they regularly discuss which songs to skip: “Drums/Space,” an instrumental track that stretches on for more than 10 minutes, is a popular choice for Deadheads seeing Dead & Company, while some Springsteen fans pick “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day,” often performed as a singalong and declared by some fans as his weakest song, to pee.  

At a Springsteen concert in February, Isabel Silva, 28, decided to go as quickly as possible before the show, then hold it for the next three hours. Silva’s game plan for the third night of Swift’s Chicago show was more elaborate: run to the bathroom at the beginning of the “Red” set, then come back in time to catch “Folklore.” 

“‘Red’ is an album I’ve heard a bajillion times,” Silva said. “I don’t need to hear ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’ live.”

Silva ended up in the line for the men’s bathroom alongside women who had the same idea when the line for the women’s bathroom got too long. 

“Men were just using the urinals, chilling with us,” Silva said, adding: “I traded some friendship bracelets.”

“My fiancé was like, ‘I’m going to power through,’” Silva said. “I was like, ‘Good luck with that!’ She made it, but obviously after that she had to go real bad.”

Katie Dozois, 24, estimated that she waited in line for about 15 minutes at one of Swift’s Chicago shows. That doesn’t sound very long, she said, but for her it meant nearly missing the pop star’s dramatic entrance onstage. “People were getting very nervous,” Dozois said of the bathroom line, which she joined right after the second opening act. 

Panicking, she made it back to her seat just one minute before the show’s countdown clock began—leaving many impatient Swifties behind her.

Several TikTok users have joked in videos that they would rather soil themselves than miss a single song. One woman said in her post that she planned to bring a 18-pack of LivDry diapers to the Eras show in Houston, though she later clarified in a comment that she was kidding.  

In an email, Shay O’Connell, who leads online marketing and content creation for TYE Medical, which owns LivDry, said while overall sales of their adult incontinence products have been largely stable since March, they have noticed an increase of younger buyers. The number of 18-24 year old buyers grew more than 25%, while 24-35 year old buyers went up about 11%. 

“These are usually the demographics that pull down the average, so it is particularly striking that they saw such an increase!” O’Connell said. “Obviously, we can’t say for certain if the Eras Tour is the main driver behind the sudden growth of younger buyers, but it is not uncommon for our customers to buy incontinence products for single-use events like concerts, road trips, or sporting events, so we certainly can’t rule Taylor’s tour out as an impacting factor!”

Meghan Moore, 27, attended night one of Swift’s concerts in Tampa, Fla., while 35 weeks pregnant. Days before the concert, she posted a TikTok debating if she should wear a Depend diaper to the show. 

“When you’re that pregnant, if the baby kicks you, you could pee,” Moore said. “Normally I could hold my bladder for three hours.”

“I already had the diapers ready in my closet,” she added, in preparation for postpartum life. Depend declined to comment.

Ultimately, her outfit choice—a tightfitting pink dress—made a diaper too bulky an undergarment to wear. Instead, she chose to duck out of the show during songs she cared less to see live: “The Man,” “tolerate it,” “Look What You Made Me Do” and once more during “Shake It Off.” 

Given the concert hits the high points of more than a decade of Swift’s music, skipping even a few minutes of the show can feel like a measured risk.

“There’s no right answer,” Rose said. “She’s a hit machine.”

Write to Ashley Wong at [email protected]