Father John Misty covers Ryan Adams’ ‘1989’ cover album

Turns out both Taylor Swift and Ryan Adams are liars. Not that anybody’s complaining – Oliver North and Milli Vanilli are probably better off forgotten. According to accounts from Adams, he recorded the album while recovering from a high-profile breakup, having turned to Swift’s music at a dark time of his life.

Both songs were later deleted.

It’s incredible actually how overwhelmingly happy everybody is about the record too. A stroke of genuine satirical genius (listen below).

Taking it as an omen, he took the tracks down. Tillman, chose to release a cover of Ryan Adams’ cover of Blank Space. If Swift’s album was ’80s pop gloss, Adams’s album favors ’70s roots rock. The opening soars in a way that Swift never quite nailed, inserting Paul Westerberg howls and power chords where Taylor’s version tended to stick to its own bubblegum heel. Sparkling standouts of the original album, the two are leaden in Adams’ hands, as a mid-tempo strummer and ghostly ballad, respectively. 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. The jangly, reverb-drenched guitars on “Welcome to New York” and “Bad Blood” invoke the ringing arpeggios of R.E.M. and The Smiths.

Meanwhile, the poet wanted his “1989” cover to sound like Bruce Springteen’s 1982 album, Nebraska. On Taylor’s 1989, they served as the announcement of the beginning of her second act as an artist, removing the then-24-year-old from her hometown and country roots and placing her at the doorstep of the Big City and Top 40, twinkling with anticipation and resounding with a newcomer’s confidence. What seems to swirl around much of this coverage is the thought that she’s somehow wasting her time on pop music. For reasons known only to perhaps Kanye, Ryan Adams has covered the whole record, with the blessing of Taylor, who called it “surreal and dreamlike”. 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. Adams’ interpretation of “1989” offers a slowed-down take on her upbeat anthems.

And stream the entirety of Adams’ attractive, devastating 1989 cover album.

To be fair, Adams was teasing us with some primo sh*t.

By highlighting the melancholy that was always present in the songs, Adams hasn’t somehow discovered it or made it safe for music fans to appreciate.