The Fat Angel Sings

When Ryan Adams started dropping hints that he wanted to cover Taylor Swift’s entire new album—1989—song for song, at first it seemed like a joke. Then, though, things got real—and now the album is released, Ryan Adams’s 1989 in its entirety. There’s nothing offhand about the finished product, which is as fully produced as Adams recent own albums and could easily be mistaken, at least by the casual fan, for a new album of Ryan Adams originals.

1989 seems destined to become the biggest seller of Adams’s career thus far, benefiting as it is from breathless promotion by Taylor Swift herself. Her 64 million Twitter followers have seen her tweet or retweet about the album dozens of times since Thursday, when Swift  wrote, “Ryan’s music helped shape my songwriting. This is surreal and dreamlike.”

Surreal and dreamlike isn’t a bad description for Adams’s take on 1989, which separates the songs on Swift’s album from their eager-to-please pop production and wraps them in layers of sweet melancholy. The joke here, if there is one, is that Adams’s version actually sounds much more like something that would have been released in 1989 than Swift’s does. Though the Polaroid photo on Swift’s album cover is a stylistic nod to the H.W. Bush years, for the most part the music on her album has little to do with the R&B-infused sound that dominated the charts in her birth year.

Adams’s version, on the other hand, is firmly in the mode he explored with Ryan Adams: the sensitive-dude singer-songwriter rock that densely populated the Top 40 for much of the ’80s. His recent Bryan Adams covers aren’t coincidental, and from the first track on 1989, “Welcome to New York,” some of his Swift covers sound almost like they could have been made by Jackson Browne or Billy Joel in 1986—with their tasteful balance of lead and rhythm guitars, their echo-chamber vocals, and their well-calibrated crescendos, Adams’s uptempo Swift songs would please the most discerning yuppie.

I mean that as a compliment: that’s the music I grew up learning to love. The sound fits as comfortably as an old shoe, and in Adams’s renditions, with Swift’s songs (many co-written with pop pros like Max Martin) find room to breathe—divorced from the stainless pop production of Swift’s original recordings. Adams reinvents “Shake It Off” as a slow-burning mid tempo plea to himself, as though it were about Sunday morning coming down; and “This Love” becomes a delicate ballad, complete with Neil-Young-esque falsetto. If the lyrics don’t quite hold up to the closer scrutiny they invite in these intimate recordings, they certainly don’t collapse either.

In the end, Adams’s 1989 is a celebration of the timeless appeal of sturdy songs and heartfelt performances. There’s a lot of musical context that’s swept up here—from ’80s rock to ’90s alt-country to ’00s pop—but with these absolutely committed performances, Adams elevates these songs to a transcendent realm. That’s not a dis on the original album: Swift was going for something that would work on Top 40 radio now, and she certainly achieved that. Adams follows the material back to his own roots—which are also, to some extent, Swift’s—and in the process, finds something that’s at once both old and new.

For weeks everywhere there has been rumors of Ryan Adams covering Taylor Swift’s 1989 album in full , Ryan Adams himself has been teasing us with short clips of Taylor Swift’s 1989.  he announced that album’s release date as Monday 21st September and shared the first song . Zane Lowe debuted Adams’ version of Swift’s massively bratty summer smash “Bad Blood” on Beats 1 Radio earlier this month, and he’s turned it into a wounded, searching acoustic song. Just like the original, though, it will lodge itself in your head all day. Thankfully, he does not attempt any of the Kendrick Lamar verses from the song’s video version. We’ve already heard a clip of Adams’ version of the song, but you can hear the whole thing below.

The digital version of Adams’ 1989 is out and Lowe will interview Adams on the radio that morning, and he’ll also field a phone call from “a very special guest.” Gee, I wonder who that could be!
This is actually happening, Ryan Adams is releasing a song-for-song cover of Taylor Swift’s album “1989.” Swift is enthusiastic about it, noting that “Ryan’s music helped shape my songwriting.”

like most people today, I’ve been listening to Ryan Adams’ take on 1989 (and talking about it a bunch). a few thoughts ,I think mainly this just appears what an incredibly good songwriter Taylor (and her posse) are. these are well constructed songs at their core. It also shows the greatness and depth Ryan teases out of ‘Out of the Woods’ is some kind of impressive. catchy pop song, moving sad bastard song.

It doesn’t really matter if you love/like all the interpretations ( I didn’t even know the originals), you have to love/like the fact he treated each song with respect and reverence- he didn’t treat this like some ‘dude in a dorm room with a guitar covering pop music’ thing.

“1989” isn’t the only release Ryan Adams has planned, either. He said his next two albums are already done and hopes to have them out in 2016. He recorded them earlier this year in New York City and describes the sound as existing somewhere between “Heartbreaker” and 2004’s “Love Is Hell.”