My cover of Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’

1. Welcome to New York

Walking through a crowd, the village is aglow, kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats under coats. Here’s a reason I love Taylor Swift’s lyrics, is that she would draw innumerable heartbeats through the image of a kaleidoscope, where they can rhythmically collapse into each other forever. She did this also on Red, where two broken hearts fall into a mosaic. Taylor Swift likes glass, whether broken together in relief, or oscillating around in a tube, or building the texture of her environments. You can hear it in the architecture of this song, which is probably meant to descend from deeper, more knotted myths of New York, but sounds instead like a Bloombergian empty glass tower, rented out year-round by people who don’t live there and who use it more as an imaginative, hydraulic space through which money flows. The precision of Swift’s vowels, her phrasing, resembles windows leaning against each other.

2. Blank Space

No better way to introduce a song called “Blank Space” than with a lightly modified emptiness, shallow clicks in a tonal vacuum. The greatest hits of pneumatic tubes. Nice to meet you, where you been? A problem with this record revealed itself immediately, and then again, over time, because every Taylor Swift album lands in my life at its precise emotional flashpoint, which tends to overwhelm any aesthetic concerns like “What are her ideas of pop music and what kinds of alien environments do they generate?” Arthritic tree limbs twisting through empty space. Taylor Swift’s ideas of pop are terrariums.

3. Style

Midnight. You come and pick me up no headlights. It’s been a year and still my favorite narrative generated by this album is “Harry Styles can’t drive.” Does he know what headlights are? Does he think headlights are the lightbulbs that materialize over the heads of cartoon characters?

I still love this song. It’s made of curves. It sounds like it evolved organically from the atmosphere above a wrinkled bedsheet. Before the video came out and admitted the song is about shadow and projection, I envisioned a different video, a universe of endless, drifting fabric, light moving through it like branching nerves. Also, this is still one of my favorite albums of last year. It was a bad year for albums. A great year for songs. Every rap song I heard last year was the best song ever, and there were no Macklemore singles. A simpler time.

4. Out of the Woods

Looking at it now, it all seems so simple. When this song came out I wrote a long piece about it as if Swift were describing the environment of a horror movie. It’s in the way Swift employs the image and the atmosphere of the woods, where spatial reasoning atrophies, where you can lose someone or lose yourself, where all directions are one direction. I like to think of the Swift song as the horror movie and the recent Ryan Adams cover as the epilogue of the horror movie, people being wheeled to the hospital in slow motion, or being gently zipped into the muscular dark of a body bag.

5. All You Had to Do Was Stay

People like you always want back the love you gave away. What is the point of a cover song? To drape yourself and your feelings and your aesthetic over someone else’s framework? To expose an authentic skeleton? To play “Wonderwall” at a party? Covers can be near-precise simulations, which is compelling in and of itself because “near-precise” implies a kind of rupture. There’s a note-perfect Cantonese cover oTthe Cranberries’ “Dreams” that figures into a prominent scene in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express, and is sung by one of the principal actors, which makes the experience of hearing it layered and uncanny, a pile of geography and time. Covers can also radically expand the environment of a song, or invert it entirely. I think of This Mortal Coil’s cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” which turns a goth song into a goth experience. There’s also Ryan Adams’ own cover of “Wonderwall,” which reduces it aesthetically and musically to kind of bonsai of dread. At its best a cover song can act like a form of living criticism, revealing aspects of a song that were buried in its texture or its arrangement. When Ryan Adams covers 1989 he pulls each song through his sensibilities, which tends to produce rock or punk or country. It can feel like he’s missing the point, exposing a deliberate pop album emotionally in this way, to try to see how it functions in less elastic aesthetic forms. But Taylor’s pop songs aren’t elastic; they’re arthritic. They’re unreadable if reflective columns of glass. And pop isn’t prescriptive. It’s omnivorous. The forms Adams writes in have flowed into and out of pop. His production techniques descend from ‘70s California pop-rock, where everything in its design has a delayed shimmer and gleam. Adams contributes to Taylor’s songs atmosphere where it had previously been vacuumed out or meticulously deleted. He adds to their text and context but they retain their sensitive shape.

6. Shake it Off

I stay out too late. Got nothing in my brain. I can’t tell if Adams is drawing this song through the sexual tension of “I’m on Fire” or the homicidal tension of “State Trooper.” Maybe both. The song feels like being sealed into the reactionary center of someone’s brain, so yeah, “State Trooper.”

7. I Wish You Would

It’s 2 a.m. in your car. I decided I like the Jack Antonoff songs on 1989 the best because they seem driven by the rhythms of nervous breakdown, and time seems to flow within them in the same distorted, recursive way it does when you’re in the midst of one. A boy is always driving past Taylor Swift’s house, locked into a kind of anxious loop, accelerating through lacunae, through things that don’t happen, things that are left unsaid and ulcerate meanly in his and her mind.

8. Bad Blood

Fuck this song.

9. Wildest Dreams

You said “No one has to know what we do.” This one is like descending into a universe of cotton. Like “Style” it’s a plush environment, but slower and thicker, like gauze. It’s also sort of boring, an unchanging if evocative landscape. Feelings are being felt but inaccessibly, in another, more precise dimension.

10. How You Get the Girl

Stand there like a ghost, shaking in the rain. I’ve always loved this song for how it foregrounds its Debbie Gibson-isms which besides the sophistopop shimmer of “Style” is the album’s firmest, most literal relationship with the ‘80s. 1989 is a cipher. If anything Taylor’s pop songs resemble the frameworks of late-’90s pop and also modern pop — yawning space in between ponderous gestures. Her sensibility is still imprinted on the songs; her vocal melodies seem to contract to the dense, syllabic rhythm of her lyrics.

11. This Love

Clear blue water, high tide came and brought you in. This song is a waterfall. It’s the only song on the record produced by Nathan Chapman, who produced and contributed harmonies to her last four records. Taylor’s voice is on its own on 1989, trying to harmonically bend against itself, like light through glass. Chapman constructs an environment around her that’s all lush, swallowing synths. It’s oceanic. There’s no up or down, just overwhelming ambiguity. Ryan Adams transforms it into a sad showtune. It’s awesome.

12. I Know Places

You stand with your hand on my waistline. I’m the only person I know who hates this song. The reasons are largely personal. I hate unearned transitions from minor keys to major keys; the effect when the bridge collapses into the chorus is supposed to generate an image of the harsh world receding in a sudden, accelerated blur, the fantasy flowing out of it, taking its place. It irritates me, which I think corresponds to a rule of fiction writing I’ve always found generally true, which is that nothing ever happens suddenly.

13. Clean

The drought was the very worst. This song is the opposite of “This Love,” an evaporated waterfall, revealing an altered landscape. As it’s the emotional event the whole album builds toward, it kind of acts as a cover of the album itself, pulling all of the previous songs into a resolution that is also a relief map of nervous breakdown. The accumulated density of a nervous breakdown occasions physical and metaphysical shifts in a person, which sometimes lock into greater clarity when someone else describes them to us, or embeds themselves empathetically in their texture. Like Taylor Swift’s 1989, Ryan Adams’ 1989 is occasionally dull, unimaginative, illuminating, shattering, uncannily quiet. Like a conversation.