Ryan Adams releases full cover of Taylor Swift's 1989

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.