About

A TAV Curator’s Pick.

1989 is the fifteenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, originally released in 2015. The album is a track-by-track cover of Taylor Swift's album of the same name.

Adams first became interested in Taylor Swift's album while coping with the collapse of his marriage to Mandy Moore. On what attracted him about Swift's album, Adams stated "There's just a joy to 1989," describing the album as "its own alternate universe." Adams initially described the album as being in the style of The Smiths. When recording the album, Adams said he found a sound somewhere between Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town and The Smiths' Meat Is Murder

In an interview with both Adams and Swift a day after the album was released, Swift ushered praise and adulation upon Adams' work, and expressed the ways in which his interpretation of the songs differs from her own, stating that "they’re not cover songs" in the commonly expected sense. "They’re reimaginings of my songs, and you can tell that he was in a very different place emotionally when he put his spin on them than I was when I wrote them. There’s this beautiful aching sadness and longing in this album that doesn’t exist in the original." - Wiki

“He’s made the songs new, but also highlighted what’s so good about the originals. … Adams has, blessedly, done more than simply transpose Swift’s songs into the genre of acoustic grizzled seriousness. There’s an intelligence and point of view to these reworkings.” – The Atlantic

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