Ryan Adams Locates The Dark Underbelly Of Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’

Taking it as an omen, he took the tracks down.

An obsessive self-chronicler, Adams will nearly certainly write his own songs about whatever went down between him and Moore.

And then there’s the ghostly cover of “Shake it Off”, whose Bruce-inflected organs, snare hits, and treble-y guitar seem straight off an unreleased B-Side to something off Born in the USA.

Misty’s covers were not done in tribute to either Adams’ or Swift’s work.

Can you remember the last time people made this big a deal out of a covers record – let alone one that just involved one artist playing a full album by another? But it’s at least a little odd to argue that an album of covers is somehow “more sincere” than the original, especially when earnest, sad-sounding covers of seemingly happy songs are a bit of a cottage industry of late. It’s not like Adams was reinventing the wheel here – Swift already had a stockade of perfectly constructed pop songs, which Adams only underscores by stripping them down to their bare framework and melodies. This may be why, for instance, Adams’s version of “Bad Blood” is an improvement on Swift’s.

Ryan Adams can do a lot with his songs, but he can’t quite do that, and so it’s interesting to see what he does on 1989 with a collection of songs so specific to the experience of youth: He makes them about the experience of aging. The photo, which looked like a meme, featured her feline with “waiting fur Ryan Adams 1989 like”. He doesn’t sound old (he is, throughout, in excellent voice) but the music sure does, thanks, in part, to Taylor Swift herself.

If there’s any good corollary between Adams and pop music, it’s more Kanye than Taylor – both are talented, ornery, temperamental geniuses who played foundational roles in forming a genre that they now hesitatingly still fit into. That he didn’t – that he has become a survivor instead, the musical equivalent of a mid-list novelist, esteemed but at the mercy of the uncertainties inherent to his trade – had to do with his own demons and profligacy, musical and otherwise, but also with the contraction and fragmentation of the music business, post-Internet. And perhaps Adams’ 1989 is actually the most alt-country thing a foundational member of the genre can do: Take the mainstream pop of a former country star and add a Telecaster and a pack of Marlboros into the mix.

On some level, the argument here is that the sadness inherent to Adams’s version of these songs is more authentic than the joy in the pop versions. Adams’ interpretation of 1989 is a case of seeing the glass half empty: He operates under the assumption that things are irrevocably damaged, and responds accordingly.