Ryan Adams' cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 is a lot of fun to think about and talk about, but not much fun to listen to. It is, in other words, a pure product of the Internet—a robust, cross-platform, thinkpiece-generating app that testifies mostly to Adams' ability to get attention. You have to hand it to him for knowing what he's doing: His album choice churns up some nice, irony-rich soil for culture and music critics to wriggle around in. Even though Taylor Swift has been a songwriter first and foremost throughout her career, 1989 was where she collaborated more intensely with superstar producers like Max Martin and Shellback to help her cross over from Queen of Pop Country to the center of the pop world proper. The move worked spectacularly: 1989 is among the best-selling albums of the post-Napster era. And now Ryan Adams has transformed it again, into... a run-of-the-mill Ryan Adams album.
It's an odd object to engage with. Adams is entertaining, always has been, and he's carved out what is by now a fascinating career, filled with a few widely beloved heartland rock albums and a great many weird one-offs that have won him a devoted cult. 1989 is on the one hand an example of the latter, but it's presented in the style of the former. He throws himself into the album completely—the arrangements are fully realized and he sings with care and precision, revealing his admiration. But he also reveals some fairly crucial points about how good songs are put together.
Every recorded song is the end point of a long road with many possible forks in it—a series of small decisions about chord changes, melody lines, lyrics, and arrangements. Swift's 1989 songs are written for a specific kind of production—the melodies are clipped, percussive, and designed to hit with force at very specific times. They are written to be electro-pop songs, which rely more on big dynamic changes and repeating cells of melody.
At its best, Swift's 1989 crackles with life, and highlights what it feels like to be young and looking at the world from a very specific moment; Adams transforms those feelings into a wistful and generic feeling of weariness. To put it in the context of an artist to whom Adams is often compared, 1989 shows why Springsteen went synth-pop on Born in the U.S.A. in 1984—the songs demanded it. The songs that sound like anthems were meant to be anthems; Springsteen's stark demos of the songs are instructive but they weren't the finished product. Remember, too, that he tried to turn his dark folk masterpiece Nebraska into a full band album but realized it needed to come out as an acoustic demo. Which is to say that "Out of the Woods" is "Dancing in the Dark", not "Atlantic City".
Swift knows this about her own material, and the demos of 1989's songs she included on the album show how dramatic the transformation can be. In Adams' hands, they are flat, flavorless rockers, and when the music isn't simply boring it crosses the line into actively grating. He wants "Blank Space" to be a Big Star-style heartfelt ballad, but the melody feels thin, rushed, and monochrome in this setting. He delivers "Shake It Off" in a grim and determined tone that would be appropriate if he were singing about how conservative politics have decimated rural families at the inaugural Farm Aid—but when paired with a repeated refrain of “haters gonna hate," it sounds ridiculous. And Adams' "Style" is downright garish, coming off like Bono fronting Survivor, the dark side of the album's titular year.
Adams' 1989, for all its sincerity and technical execution, is ultimately hollow because it's nothing but context. There's everything surrounding it (the unexpected match of singer and song, the details of the release) and there's what you bring to it (your relationship to the music of Swift and Adams, your demographic profile, your feelings on rock and pop and covers in general) but there's no essential reason for it to exist. This is why Father John Misty's rush-released version of "Blank Space", wherein he remade Swift's song in the style of the Velvet Underground, was such a brilliant example of a recorded song as music criticism. His track was a hilarious (and, importantly, still musically enjoyable) reminder that Adams' entire album is a gesture. It's a formal exercise. You listen and think, "Ah, I see what he did there" and then you forget about it.
