Ryan Adams on His Full-Album Taylor Swift Cover: ‘You Just Have to Mean It’
Last Christmas, Ryan Adams was, in his words, “a little lost.” He’d wrapped up one leg of a tour supporting his self-titled album, and he and his wife Mandy Moore had just separated. “I had gone through some life changes, and it would be the first Christmas and New Year’s I’d spend by myself in over five years,” he recalls. “And I thought, ‘What the fuck am I going to do?'”
Chilling out on his tour bus, Adams would read or fixate on the same album so many others were obsessing over at the time, Taylor Swift’s 1989. “I was listening to that record and thinking, ‘I hear more,'” he says. “Not that there was anything missing. I would just think about the sentiments in the songs and the configurations.” During his lonely-guy Christmas break, Adams had what he calls “this weird idea.” Buying a four-track cassette recorder, he decided to recut Swift’s new songs in his style. “It wasn’t like I wanted to change them because they needed changing,” he says. “But I knew that if I sang them from my perspective and in my voice, they would transform. I thought, ‘Let me record 1989 like it was Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.'”
For several days, Adams did just that, reconfiguring Swift’s songs as stark voice-guitar-harmonica remakes. The experiment didn’t last long—four songs in, the recorder malfunctioned and devoured and mangled the tape—but the idea of recasting the entire 1989 stayed with Adams. This past August, he tried again, this time with fellow musicians in a full-on studio, and the second time around, Adams made it all the way through his complete, same-sequence remake of 1989. “It’s not a reimagining or a reconstruction at all,” Adams insists. “It’s a parallel universe. That’s how I think of it. We’re creating an alternate universe, like in Marvel Comics.”
With Swift herself chiming in when she heard the news (“Is this true???????” she tweeted. “I WILL PASS OUT”), what began as a killing-time lark has turned into one of the year’s most anticipated albums: Adams’ own 1989, released digitally today, with a vinyl and CD release imminent. “Holy heck y’all,” Lena Dunham tweeted last week. “Just heard [the album] and it’s a masterwork. Taylor Swift as you never imagined.”
Adams wants to make one thing clear: He’s no-nonsense serious about the project. A Swift fan since he first heard “White Horse,” he’s an unabashed admirer of her skills, which became vividly apparent to him when the two collaborated on an unreleased song a few years ago. Looking for help finishing a song, Swift visited Pax-Am — Adams’ own studio inside Sunset Sound in Los Angeles — and sat down with Adams and a couple of guitars. “She had a verse and the first part of a chorus, and she wasn’t sure where to go with it,” he recalls. “She had this really cool riff and verse, and we dug in and worked all day.” That same night, the untitled song finished, the two recorded what Adams calls a “groovy” demo of it, which remains unreleased to this day. (Adams says he isn’t sure what will come of it.)