Album Review: Ryan Adams “1989”
You might be thinking to yourself, but wait, there’s already an album called “1989” and it was created by pop mega-star Taylor Swift. Well you’d be right, “1989” was the fifth studio album by Taylor Swift, an album that was critically well received and considered to be something of a masterful piece of pop song-writing and production. That is why the music world straddled the line between amused and genuinely interested when Ryan Adams, the singer-songwriter known for his guitar driven rock and alternative country rock songs announced his plan to release a cover album of “1989.”
Cover songs often come about for a number of different reasons. Sometimes a lesser known artist will create a cover song in the hopes of lifting their own fame using the established brand name of a successful musician. Other times cover songs look to mock the original content, re-contextualizing a sound to call attention to absurdities or weaknesses in the original source content. And cover songs can also be done simply out of admiration. Regardless of intent, I have found that most cover songs don’t generally offer the same appeal and level of complexity that an original musical composition does. I’m happy to say that this is not the case with “1989.” It is clear from listening to any of Ryan Adams “1989” that these covers are coming from somewhere deeper than that. Adams takes a piece of shiny pop, and casts a layer of melancholy over it, examining lyrics that are often darker than the cheerful Taylor Swift performances would indicate from the original “1989.” This is very clear in Adams cover of “Blank Space.”
The soft guitar strumming accompanied with the mournful sounding voice of Adams reinvents the song. Taylor Swift’s original is a tightly constructed pop song that dominated the radio waves for months with its catchy tune. The song is something of an anthem when done by Swift. She playfully mocks the tabloid culture which exhaustively covers every single detail of her love life. And as she sings “I’ve got a blank space baby, I’ll write your name,” you can imagine the empowered Swift, mocking the celebrity culture and rumor mill. When Adams says “I’ve got a blank space baby, I’l write your name,” you imagine him sitting alone in a dimly lit apartment with a notebook, writing a dozen sad little love songs to a woman. It’s the combination of pacing and soft vocal performance, but the entire combination allows Adams to take the original source material and reinvent it, pulling a sadness from Swift’s song from below the surface and up to the forefront.
Whether you think Adams is doing anything truly original, or adding meaning to the music doesn’t really matter too much, because at the very least his renditions of the songs are entirely different, and very listenable. Going from soft 90’s rock to old school Springsteen from song to song, Adams reinterprets the songs in a number of ways, with an underlying hint of sadness present in most of the covers. Ryan Adams “1989” is worth the listen, and for the time being the whole album is streamable from Ryan Adam’s YouTube page.
