After his separation from wife Mandy Moore, on tour, and around the holiday season, Ryan Adams found himself a little lost and alone.
Adams found himself listening to the one album that everyone (including us) seemed to be obsessing over, Taylor Swift’s 1989. The holiday season got lonely and while on his tour bus, Adams had “this weird idea.” He bought a four-track cassette recorder and decided to re-cut some of Swift’s tracks — in his own style: “It wasn’t like I wanted to change them because they needed changing, but I knew that if I sang them from my perspective and in my voice, they would transform. I thought, ‘Let me record 1989 like it was Bruce Spingsteen’s Nebraska.”
When Swift heard the news, her excitement was obvious:
@hasief @TheRyanAdams is this true??????? I WILL PASS OUT.
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) August 6, 2015
What started as a fun, inspirational experiment turned into one of this year’s most anticipated albums!
Tonight the madness continues… 4 songs left!!! W @cstavish @totally_tod @natelotz #1989
A photo posted by Ryan Adams (@misterryanadams) on Aug 12, 2015 at 10:18am PDT
Adam’s released his version of 1989 digitally at Midnight on September 21st.
He then sat down with Zane Lowe on Beats 1 that same afternoon. Zane thinks “what [Ryan’s] done with this album is phenomenal.”
Swift herself surprised everyone and called the show. She comments that “the album is absolutely gorgeous and you can tell it was something that was well thought out and conceptualized, it was not thrown together. What struck [her] immediately when [she] listened to it is how they’re not cover songs – they’re re-imaginings of [her] songs. You can tell [Ryan] was in a very different place emotionally when he put his spin on the album than [Taylor Swift] was when [she] wrote them because there’s this beautiful aching sadness and longing in this album that doesn’t exist in the original.”
There is, however, one problem that Swift confessed…
Heard on Beats 1 – Apple Music