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Post by Admin on Sept 17, 2015 22:19:17 GMT
Rock musician Ryan Adams has spent weeks in his Los Angeles recording studio covering Taylor Swift's 1989 from start to finish, and now he's ready to release it. Adams has announced that the album will launch digitally on September 21st, and one track, "Bad Blood," will debut today at 12PM ET exclusively on Apple's Beats 1. Preorders open tonight at 12AM ET, and those who buy through iTunes will receive "Bad Blood" as an instant download. Adams says his reimagining of 1989 will also come to CD and vinyl "soon." There's been plenty of buzz around the project — thanks in large part to Swift paying close attention to it and sharing Adams' progress on Twitter. Adams has already shared plenty of video snippets from the recording sessions via his Instagram page. As you might guess, his take on Swift's hit album is dramatically different from the original recording; he called in a string quartet for "Blank Space," if that gives you a hint of the sadness we're all in for. (Other tracks like "Style" are a bit more upbeat.) itunes.apple.com/us/post/idsa.1abd6ab2-5d56-11e5-b908-c93efe19c8b3
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Post by Admin on Sept 21, 2015 22:21:30 GMT
Before Ryan Adams considered covering a Taylor Swift album, he wrote a song with her. Adams, who released a track-by-track remake of Swift's blockbuster 1989 Monday, got a call from Swift while she was writing songs for her 2012 album Red, asking if they could work on a song together. "She basically already had this thing done," says Adams, a prolific singer-songwriter and five-time Grammy nominee whose music Swift has said helped shape her songwriting. "I just sat down and went, 'What about this?' And 'What about this?' We worked on a bridge, and we finished it. I guess I was the guy who could call people that would come in around 11 or 12 to jam." Swift never released that song, but that session gave Adams an inside look into the creative process of one of the world's biggest pop stars. While Adams believes the two share a kindred songwriting sense — "I joke that we're the F to A Minor Club," he says — he's also a little in awe of her ability to craft songs that speak to massive audiences and individuals alike. "There's that special, very interesting ingredient where you hear a skeleton of the song, just the bones, and her voice, and you go, 'Well, of course, this person plays to 60,000 people.' It's like at the end of Dune, with Paul Atreides riding the Sandworm, and his eyes are all blue from the spice mélange. That's totally how I see Taylor."
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Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2015 22:23:15 GMT
If there’s one song at the heart of Ryan Adams’s 1989, it’s a single not off Taylor Swift’s album of the same name, but rather one from her second album, 2008’s Fearless. “White Horse,” the acoustic ballad that breaks the fourth wall on the storybook romance that propelled her preceding single, "Love Story," is what triggered Adams’s immense admiration for the then-17-year-old singer. As Adams told Zane Lowe yesterday, it’s near impossible to sing “White Horse” without a lump forming in your throat when the chorus swells. So it came as little surprise to hear Adams explain what drew him to 1989: While the obvious story was Swift removing the country façade in full embrace of dance-pop, all Adams heard “was the emotional content” of the album. Even lyrically, where others focused on diss tracks and “haters gonna hate” anthems, Adams was reminded of what he got out of listening to the Smiths and Hüsker Dü in another part of his life. His goal with 1989, then, especially as he was “going through a hard time” — i.e., getting a divorce from Mandy Moore — was to take these songs that punched him in the guts and make the world see what he saw in them. Point is, of the many reasons to be a Taylor Swift fan, Ryan Adams is 100 percent in it for the feels. His sad-bastard overhaul of 1989 works as well as it does — and to be sure, it doesn’t in some places — because Taylor Swift, for better or for worse, is the most earnest pop star of our time. That’s the quality Adams heightens in her music, and with any other Swift release before 1989, it likely would not have had the same effect — she provided enough stripped-down feeling right there on the surface. Yet to hear Adams turn 1989’s heavier moments into solid steel anchors into the heart is to reach the rock bottom of his own despair: When he screams, then whispers, “When you’re young, you run, but you come back to what you need” on a gorgeously desperate piano take on Swift’s “This Love,” it doesn’t feel like that much of a stretch. These two are cut from the same emotional cloth. In fact, the idea that they’d be mutual fans of each other’s work is not terribly surprising at all, despite the internet’s odd initial shock that two heart-on-my-sleeve, formerly-country-tinged singer-songwriters might vibe. If this were 15 years ago, when Adams was still showing rockists that country ain’t all that bad, releasing a full cover album of a global pop icon would be one of the boldest poptimist statements ever made. (Can you imagine if, instead of making Summerteeth, Wilco covered Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love?) But this is nothing that attentive listeners haven’t heard for the last half-decade in our increasingly genre-agnostic musical landscape, one in which indie stars covering chart-toppers is commonplace. Perceptions of ironic intentions are, at this point, more on the listener than the artist.
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Post by Admin on Oct 20, 2015 21:45:04 GMT
Ryan Adams recently re-recorded Taylor Swift's 1989 – a covers album that was enthusiastically approved by Swift herself – and now the two artists have sat down for a conversation for GQ. In their chat, they discuss the art of songwriting, their method of conquering writer's block and Adams' heartbreaking version of Swift's upbeat album. "You know when actors say a line, they say a sentence, but they say it with different emphasis on different words and they completely change it? That's what you did with my album," Swift tells Adams of his 1989. "When you take a song like 'All You Had to Do Was Stay,' my version of it is [hair flip] 'All you had to do was stay. Sorry about it. I don't miss you, but now you're back.' Yours is like, 'All you had to do was stay. You broke my heart. That's all you had to do.'" Adams also asked Swift if her dreams have ever generated song ideas. "The song 'All You Had to Do Was Stay,' there's a really high-pitched 'Stay!' I had a dream, my ex showed up at my door, knocked on the door, and I opened it up and I was about ready to launch into the perfect thing to say," Swift said. "Instead, all that would come out of my mouth was that high-pitch chorus of people singing 'Stay!'"
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Post by Admin on Oct 26, 2015 21:00:15 GMT
Taylor Swift may not be performing on late night TV much these days, but last night, Ryan Adams took the mic for her. He played his dreamy cover of "Welcome to New York" for Jimmy Kimmel (who staged his show in Brooklyn). And boy slayed it: “I was like, huh, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska was recorded on cassette four-track. So I thought, I should learn Taylor’s record, but record it in that style. The cassette tape broke while I was doing it, so all of that was abandoned. But I kept the idea.” This project, he’s at pains to point out, was born out of a sincere love of Swift’s music. He names White Horse, from 2008’s Fearless, as the first song of hers that really moved him and talks about it with the wild-eyed immediacy of a superfan: “The first time I heard it I got chills head to toe. I remember feeling shocked by her voice, shocked at how clean that song was. I like stuff that sort of penetrates through my regular consciousness and hits me where I’m not looking. That’s usually stuff that’s a little darker.” He continues: “You know, that song is really about disillusionment on such a grand scale. I just thought about how this is hitting me like a tidal wave, it’s so romantic and so beautiful, and yet so sad and so disillusioned – it’s all the stuff I love about the Smiths. That song fucked me up and I couldn’t believe it. Her voice does this thing. It just goes through all my bullshit detectors and right into my heart and soul.”
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