Almost two hours into Taylor Swift’s set Friday night during the Denver stop on her Eras Tour, I had sat down to make some notes as Swift chatted with the crowd about re-recording her 2012 album, “Red.” She talked about her decision to re-record her first six albums so she could fully own the recordings, and releasing songs she originally wrote for them but that didn’t make it onto the records.

Then she mentioned a song originally much longer than the version that ultimately made it onto the 2012 version of “Red.”

I immediately leapt out of my seat and stared, giddily and wide-eyed, at my coworker, Kyla, next to me. Swift was talking about “All Too Well,” a song never released as a single from that album but a cult favorite among Swift’s fans and one of my favorite songs by any artist, ever. I purposely hadn’t checked the set list for her show, so I didn’t know whether she would play this ballad fans have long speculated is about Swift’s brief relationship and breakup with actor Jake Gyllenhaal.

“There’s another song I want to play if you happen to have about 10 minutes,” Swift told the 73,000-person crowd, which erupted in cheers, referencing the extended version of “All Too Well”’s notorious runtime. Standing onstage in a sequin-encrusted red-and-black duster jacket and strumming a glittering black guitar, she wove images of driving through quaint streets lined with fallen autumn leaves and a scarf of hers left over from the pair’s time together her ex-lover can’t bring himself to get rid of.

Kyla and I locked eyes as we belted out, “You kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath,” one of my favorite previously unheard lyrics from the version Swift re-recorded for the song’s longer version in 2021.

I have loved “All Too Well” because to me it’s a core example of her songwriting prowess, with heart-wrenching turns of phrase like “I forget about you long enough to forget why I needed to.” As a fan of Swift, I’ve felt like I grew up with her because she’s within two years of my age. And her music tends to be “excruciatingly autobiographical” – her description – reflecting the anxieties, joys and pain of the period in Swift’s life she’s going through at the time.

Swift’s bubbly song “22” from “Red” about the vivaciousness of young adulthood was a radio hit around the time I turned 22. And her single “Anti-Hero” from Swift’s most recent album, “Midnights,” feels like it perfectly captures the voice in the back of your head that tends to amplify small social faux pas and wonders if anyone actually likes you.

Her lyrics about relatable topics like heartbreak and social anxiety can easily make you feel like she’s speaking directly to your most closely held inner narratives, like “When you aim at the devil, make sure you don’t miss” and “When my depression works the graveyard shift, all of the people I’ve ghosted stand there in the room.”

Seeing Swift live for the first time Friday night felt like it cemented her seeming relatability for me: As the crowd went wild during a pause, she shook her head and smiled as if she couldn’t quite believe the throngs of people were there to see her. She made corny jokes, like the one when she struggled to brush a lock of hair out of her face: “Excuse me, there are 73,000 people here!”

Seeing Swift up close definitely brought a feeling of awe that this person whose music has been a big part of my life but I’ve only seen in pictures is, well, a real person. But the experience also drove home that at the end of the day, Swift is just a woman about my age who probably isn’t all that different from me in a lot of ways, but happens to have an incredible life because of what her musical talent and drive have brought her. But she has the same heartbreaks, worries about what people think of her, and likes cats and cozy sweaters.

So as Swift worked her way through her bubbliest hits and most mournful ballads, Friday night’s show felt more like dancing and singing with an old friend than watching perhaps the most famous pop star in the world right now.