Sometime in August 2015,
Ryan Adams let everybody in on a secret: he'd decided to cover
Taylor Swift's
1989 in total. This was not the first album-length cover of
Adams' career (he never released his version of
the Strokes'
Is This It), nor was this his first attempt at
1989. He initially attempted a stark, four-track rendition of the record -- naturally dubbed his
Nebraska -- but he wound up settling on "in the style of 'As played by the Smiths'," which was an elegant way of saying
Adams'
1989 could easily slide onto a PostModern MTV playlist from 1989-1990 and not ruffle many feathers. Such shimmering sadness is
Adams' default mope mode, neatly showcased on
Love Is Hell (co-produced by
John Porter, who helmed the first
Smiths records), and this is certainly a cousin. Sharp guy that he is,
Adams realizes the bulk of the record can't all be brokenhearted strums, so not all of
1989 glimmers in a flat black pool. "All You Had to Do Was Stay" surges to a Modern Rock pulse, but he cheekily inverts the exuberance of "Shake It Off," strips the
T'Pau and
Chvrches out of "Out of the Woods," and softens the steely "Blank Space," thereby turning the first three singles into laments. Nevertheless, there's no disguising how
Ryan Adams flips
Taylor Swift's
1989 upside-down, turning a moment of triumph into bedsit introspection, a concept that is undoubtedly theoretically interesting, but the record works because
Adams doesn't play this as a stunt. He's as canny a producer as he is a conceptualist, coaxing forgotten college rock sounds out of his Pax-Am Studios and treating
Swift's originals as text to be interpreted, a move that neither saves nor strengthens the originals but rather highlights the skill of
Taylor the songwriter and
Adams the musician.