Taylor Swift uses her concerts as a "coping mechanism".

During her show at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California on Thursday (03.07.23), the 33-year-old pop star opened up about how the COVID-19 affected her touring plans as she was unable to hit the road for several years and she admitted the stalled performance schedule was tough because she finds playing live helps her deal with life's issues.

According to Variety, Taylor told the audience: "The reason we didn’t tour for five years — that was not a normal or scheduled thing. We had a global pandemic; we had much more important things that we had to worry about. But I’ve been playing shows sort of as a coping mechanism my whole life, since I was about 12 years old."

She went on to explain: "I go through this process where I feel things, I write a song about that thing, I show it to you and I go, ‘Do you like it? Did you ever feel this way too?’ And so when you guys are at at a show, if you even nod your head or make eye contact with me or sing the words to a song during a show, that to me validates that emotion and makes me feel like I wasn’t alone in feeling it. It’s sort of my coping process in life — so all of a sudden that was gone."

The singer then explained she threw herself into recording as much new music as she could because she was unable to get out on the road and perform.

She added: "So I decided in order to keep that connection going, if I couldn’t play live shows with you, I was going to make and release as many albums as humanly possible."

Taylor went on to release three albums in two years with both 'Folklore' and 'Evermore' dropping in 2020 and 'Midnights' following in 2022.

Her last tour before the pandemic was the 2018 'Reputation Stadium Tour' but she's since returned to the road wth 'The Eras Tour' which will stretch into 2024.