Blank Space

So. Like a lot of people, I've been anxiously awaiting Ryan Adams' new album ever since he announced he was recording it about a month ago. A new Adams LP isn't exactly an unusual thing, given that the guy may be the most prolific artist of the past few decades, or at least in the same general league as Prince and Springsteen. But this one was unusual in that he was recording a complete cover of the Taylor Swift album 1989. And given how fine an album that was, the prospect of Adams covering every song in the style, as he said, of other artists such as The Smiths was highly intriguing.

Well, it's here. And the redoubtable Stereogum put it well when they wrote:

One of society’s great blights is the plague of sensitive acoustic-guitar-slinging white guys playing ironic-not-ironic covers of big, sparkly pop songs. Every once in a while, some dipshit will come along and attempt to convince you that Travis’ “Baby One More Time” or Ted Leo’s “Since U Been Gone” is the best version of the song. These people are psychopaths, and you should back away from them very slowly. The myth of the acoustic-white-guy cover is that it reveals a song’s hidden strengths, or maybe lays bare its insipidness, by stripping away all the attention-grabbing production trickery. Whatever the aims of Travis or Leo, whether the covers were affectionate or not, all they succeeded in doing was peeling away the force and immediacy of a couple of great songs. It’s not a new phenomenon, either. In his book Positively 4th Street, David Hadju wrote about how Joan Baez, in her coffeehouse folk days, used to play spare, mocking covers of Frankie Lymon songs, a tidbit that made me disdain Baez more than countless road-trip hours with my parents ever could. (Ain’t like Baez ever recorded a song as enduring as “Why Do Fools Fall In Love.”) But with all this in mind, it brings me great satisfaction to report that Ryan Adams’ new album-length reimagining of Taylor Swift’s 1989 is not a part of this loathsome tradition. We can debate its merits all day, but Adams knows what some of us know: 1989 is a shining, laser-guided new-pop masterpiece, a personal vision rendered with blockbuster scope and virtuosic panache. He wasn’t going to improve it in any way. It just wasn’t going to happen. But he could reflect it through the lens of his own experience and put his own stamp on it. And that’s what he did.

Indeed he did.

(And, for the record, I love the Travis cover, although it can't touch the Spears original—although, to be fair, there aren't a whole lot of records that can.)

As with the fantastic Richard Thompson cover of Britney Spears's "Oops, I Did It Again," Adams is neither covering this ironically nor attempting to imbue it with artistic credibility. Adams is clearly a legitimate fan, which means he understands that there's no need for him to try to argue in favor of its merit, since that's obvious to anyone with ears and an understanding of popular music.

What he does do, by stripping it back, is make undeniable what was already obvious, which is that it's simply a great damn song—great lyrics, great melody, set over the top of (basically) the chords to "Hungry Heart." (Which is, itself, not a terribly uncommon chord progression.) And since Adams is a finer singer than Swift—and I don't mean that as a slam; how ordinary if pleasant her voice is was one of the things that was so likable about Swift in the first place—that gives the recording an extra boost to compensate what has been lost in the decrease in volume. And the Nebraska-era Springsteenian fingerpicked guitar meets "Here Comes a Regular" strings is a fabulous way to have arranged the song.

The thing is that I've listened to it a dozen times now and I feel a little sicker each time I do. Because it's one thing when übërfamous twenty-something pop star Taylor Swift sings it and, no matter how not closely we may follow her various romantic adventures, we can't help but have some idea of the biographical basis and instinctively get the tongue-in-cheek nature of the lyrics, even if that tongue's being bitten from a bit of bitterness over the unpleasantness of having your every emotional move chronicled by the paparazzi as though the fate of the entire earth hinged on who you're dating this week.

But it's something else entirely when a middle-aged white guy sings this same song. No matter how lovely his vocals—and they are—this middle-aged white guy can't get past how creepy the singer is, how at best he's a really skeevy skeez hitting on someone way younger and more naive, and more likely he's a raging douche—and very possibly a literal psychopath. Suddenly the long list of ex-lovers is transmogrified into the famous Shakespeare aphorism "if everyone you meet is an asshole, odds are, you're the asshole." I can't stop wondering why any female would ever be with him, and I want to tell the one he's currently singing to to please for the love of god run as the best-case scenario is that this manchild is almost certainly going to devastate you emotionally and very possibly end the night dancing to himself in front of a mirror while wearing your skin.

Which isn't to say it's a bad record. Just the opposite. Adams has taken a great song and come up with a great cover. And it's instructive to note some of the liberties he took with the lyrics, such as changing "'cuz we're young and we're reckless" to "so goddamn reckless," or the fact that he eliminated entirely the bridge, which goes:

Boys only want love if it's torture 
Don't say I didn't say I didn't warn you

A good call on his part. The entire song is.  It's just that it makes me feel ill. Maybe that's all me, but I find it hard to believe an artist as intelligent, learned and thoughtful (if himself not a little self-destructive) as Adams didn't have some idea that was an impression that could easily be given. It's fascinating and eerie and I can't stop listening to it but I really wish I could.

[ADDED JULY 2020: revisiting this five years down the road, I feel oddly and unhappily prescient.]