He namedropped Bob Mould as one his favorite musicians, but added in the same breath: “But then I also love all those songs on (Swift’s) “Fearless” (album)”.
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When Ryan Adams’ latest album, a remake of Taylor Swift’s album 1989, was just a twinkle in the artist’s eye, yet to be fleshed out, there was a plenty of skepticism, confusion, and a belief that he was pulling on everyone’s legs.
“Let me record 1989 like it was Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska“, Adams recently told Rolling Stone magazine, describing his too-good-to-be-true version as an alternate universe to the one inhabited by the highest-selling album of a year ago. “They have like a million lyrics”, he told the crowd, and though he performed the song, solo, with an acoustic guitar, he might as well have been reading it, the way squares used to read rock and roll lyrics on television back in the fifties, milking the yucks from every “A wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom”. Swift released the original album – her first full-blown pop record – last October.
Beyond the “cover album in the style of…” nature of the record, what makes it more than just a collection of moody covers is Adams’s ability to tease out the tension in Swift’s songwriting. It’s an evocative song no matter how you style it, and Swift deserves far more credit for what Ryan Adams can do with a song like that in his hands. According to Stereogum, Misty tweeted on Monday “what a dumb world” before deleting it. He also said “In the studio working on a song for song reinterpretation of Ryan Adams 1989, gonna be great!”
This is how we tend to write about Swift – as a terrific songwriter who’s mostly about giving tabloids fodder by dropping hints about past relationships. Its pop production might glimmer, but it has all the echo of an empty room.
So, I think you can see the bind he found himself in. There couldn’t be any more reason for popstar Swift to feel elated right now.
Listen to Swift’s 1989, and throughout, the album throws these moments at you.
But in his appealingly ragged singing you can also hear the mixture of dismay and gratitude that any pop listener brings to a song that captures precisely what he or she is going through.
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.
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When his album works, however, is when it finds an emotional tension of its own, only his is between sadness and anger. Where Swift aims for rage and mostly ends up with a smug sense of superiority, Adams really gets there – but he’s forever balanced out by the sadness that threatens to consume him whole.
