Taylor Swift is the biggest artist in music, and one of the most critically acclaimed.
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The “Blank Space“, which is also part of the album, hitmaker is all support to her newest pal. This might seem like a ridiculous reading, but it was a theme powerfully explored in Francois Ozon’s recent French psychological drama The New Girlfriend – in which a bereaved widower, David, copes with his wife’s death by wearing her clothing.
U.S. Girls – Half FreeTo quote the redoubtable Mathew Ward (a friend and fierce music lover): “OMG I am in love with this U.S. Girls record”.
Swift changed her costume nearly a dozen times. The singer-songwriter described the release as “the most fragile thing” he’s done.
Adams has made it clear that he considers Swift a peer and has forged a deep emotional connection to her songs.
Did you play it to Taylor Swift? On numerous songs, Adams settles on the kind of ringing acoustic arrangements she has long since discarded in favor of beats manufactured in Scandinavian music laboratories; in doing so – in finding echoes of Swift, in Swift – he has excavated the bones of her songwriting, and also the essence of both her vulnerability and his own. At this point, it strikes you that this is Ryan Adams covering a Taylor Swift album, and gifted interpreter of the modern songbook as the former may be, there are some times – as with almost every covers album in history – where it just isn’t going to work.
Yet Adams, who recorded “1989” at his Pax-Am studio in Hollywood, isn’t merely playing an elaborate record-nerd game. But Swift also gains by the association, which reveals her to be a much more nuanced songwriter than her own album suggested. Evan has been a guest on HuffPost Live, RevotTV’s “Revolt Live!”, and WNYC’s Soundcheck (an NPR affiliate), was the Executive Producer for the Good With Words: A Tribute to Benjamin Durdle album (available for free), and wrote the liner notes for the 2011 re-release of Andre Cymone’s hit 1985 album A.C. Until then, though, you get the sense that he’s using “1989” to answer another question: Has anyone else ever felt like this? The idea that male experience and expression defines our norms, even at the level of basic communication, and the female always enters the conversation as an afterthought, in protest, or as exceptional, remains a buried reality in popular music.
And she’s savvy, too. “I like to cover songs that people might deem uncoverable”.
“By this time he had turned into an obscene visage of my Father and said, “I have one injunction for you, son: That you enjoy life”. Hundreds, if not thousands, of fans are rushing to YouTube and Spotify right now to get a taste of Adams’ scratchier and darker version of Swift’s original pop melodies, and then rushing back to re-visit Swift’s first take.
Covers are nothing new to the recording industry. Check out his treatment of Swift’s “Bad Blood” below.
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“Something in his state of mind and musical sensibility listened to the romantic exuberance of a young woman’s pop album and heard his own melancholy”.
