★★★½
Alternative music has long indulged in the ironic Top 40 cover.
So naturally there was great novelty in Ryan Adams announcing his intentions to cover Taylor Swift’s 1989 in full. But make no mistake; this is not a project that is fuelled by irony, but rather passion.
Adams has taken the biggest pop album of 2014, stripped it right back, and attacked it like it’s Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. 1989 was Swift definitively stepping away from the acoustic guitars and country-tinged instrumentation, but Adams has brought these songs right back into that field. Top 40 bangers have been reworked into slow ballads, spearheaded by acoustic guitars and Adams’ distinctive voice. The songs are certainly sparser though his interpretations, allowing the lyrics to spill forward as they tell tales of love, heartbreak and self-discovery.
Opening track ‘Welcome To New York’ is a love letter to The Boss, while ‘Blank Space’ sees Adams test out some falsetto alongside finger-picked guitar and strings. Yet while these covers are well done, they’re disorganised. It all lacks the flow and fully formed vision of Swift’s original.
‘Real Music’ purists will insist these renditions are a vast improvement on the original. But this album only works because the source material is so strong.
