I spent the weekend internalizing Ryan Adams' wholesale cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 record. It took a treadmill, a few trips to the store, and a walk around the block to really let it seep into my auditory pores. That's probably three solid front-to-back listens, and then a few searched-for songs while sitting on the front porch with a cocktail, because those particular songs stood out above the rest. That's generally bare minimum for me to make a real judgment call on an album, but since most records are short in comparison to other populist media like film or games, this many listens is about what I would put into a movie or short game. It's easy to gloss over some of the deeper layers, even if you're listening intently while purposely cordoning yourself from the rest of the thinking world to run in place for a number of miles that only matter to you and the accountants at your gym. You really got to get in there, people.
I guess since I said that I "bare minimum-ed" it means that it's kind of bad. It isn't. I guess that last sentence is meant to imply that it's kind of good. Well, it isn't either. It's definitely more of one than the other, though, and that depends on if you are goodly enough to agree with the following statement: Ryan Adams' best album by a country mile was Love is Hell. It was his magnum opus, even though he has before and since written several other albums that he himself will consider as such. 1989 is a sequel to the Love is Hell period in just about every way save for who actually wrote the lyrics to the songs. That reads a little weird, but stick with me because like all sequels, it both galvanizes what made the original beautiful and holy and rehashes shit that should have been left well enough alone.
Let's take a quick second to explain Love is Hell, Adams' would-be follow up to his breakout album, Gold. See, Gold was a creative and commercial success at a time where the accursedly-named "alt.country" genre was in something of a stride. Wilco was selling lots of records, and I think people were just good and sick of Dave Matthews once they finally graduated from college, so while Son Volt fans were still wondering when they'd get their time in the, erm, sun, a scrappy egotist that had recently left the band Whiskeytown decided to break out on his own following the strong reviews and mediocre sales of his original album, Heartbreaker (a record that spawned "Come Pick Me Up," a single that pervaded just about every romantic comedy on the planet for a year). This was Adams, of course, and the whole world basically shit themselves over how good Gold was, including and especially one Sir Elton John whom once referred to Adams as" great one;" something fans love to recount when you tell them that much of Adams' output has been found to be overrated.
Anyway, so after Gold hit kind of big, his label, Lost Highway, was all like, hey man, make us another sweet jam like that. He was like, no, baby, I just recorded an album of mope rock songs because that's been my head space for a minute. They came back with more of a nonononononono. So, depending on which myth you believe, over the next month, or the next weekend, or while he waited for a burger to finish grilling, Adams recorded the majority of Rock N Roll, a sort of sweet ode to the music that he evidently likes, because it's chock full of callbacks and shout outs to the Strokes, Pink Floyd, U2 and a bunch of other stuff. Yet, there was overlap on this record with what he had already completed for this now-scrapped mope rock album, which was reevaluated and released in two halves (and eventually, its own standalone album with expanded songs) called, you guessed it, Love is Hell. Adams, then, recorded errant songs when pressed to compile a pretty good album in the form of Rock N Roll while still getting to release a very, very good record in Love is Hell. That's kind of the way he rolls, though. He's a pretty prolific guy.
Another thing about Adams is that he's definitely a cover song guy, too, which leads us back to the present. His superlative retooling of Oasis' "Wonderwall" was the catalyst for all of this (which, yes, was on both Rock N Roll and Love is Hell), and the guy hasn't looked back, dropping stuff like Alice In Chains songs on EPs and deep Grateful Dead tracks at live shows. Having been clear to the listening world that he wanted to do a Smiths-like re-recording of all of those Taylor Swift songs marries both what he did with Rock N Roll and Love is Hell into a goofy, if fascinating cohesion: A mope rock album that pays tribute to stuff he evidently likes.
1989, when stripped of the novelty of being covers of pop songs, sounds every bit like Love is Hell to a fault. Whole guitar parts on latter tracks like "Wildest Dreams" and "This is Love" seem like they were cut and pasted from the earlier album, which is probably the primary culprit for the back end of the record sounding way too same-y than it should have been based on the source material. The album's first three tracks present a great tonal jump from mopey to funk-furious by the time that "Style" shows up, which is maybe one of the better single picks from the whole affair, but the rest of the album never catches up with it, and it settles into being too down-tempo by the middle to the point of being boring by the end.
When taken as individual tracks, though, Adams does some cool rejiggering with these very dreamy pop numbers, even if they wind up sounding like stuff he's put to tape a dozen times over at this point. "Out of the Woods" is sappy, but ends with a nice, long fadeout that added some texture to the song. Same with "Bad Blood," probably Swift's most idiotic single, when he ripped away its overproduced faux-hip hop sound. Yes, Adams' song wound up sounding like adult contemporary dad rock, but this was probably the only thing from this whole experiment that fixed a problem that didn't really exist; something covers albums always try to do. There's really nothing edgy or dangerous about any of these songs --not that there needed to be-- in Adams' hands, but since they're coming from the prevailing pop princess of the moment, they actually kind of are for her, which is a little weird. Still, a lot of what you'll hear on this album will probably wind up in that many more romantic comedies, I suppose, because their middle-range tempo and calm, syrupy demeanor are custom made for montages that involve rain and the people that silently stare at it.
What we have, then, is a boring album of mostly good covers which sound nothing like Smiths songs if you've ever listened to a Smiths album. But they sound like Ryan Adams songs of a certain vintage. If that kind of thing flips your lid, then you'll find something to love about 1989, more than just what it might represent. The rest of the world, though, can just listen to the original album and be equally satisfied.
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