I haven’t done much (or any) coverage of Ryan Adams’ cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I haven’t talked about it because I really don’t know what to say. Taylor and Ryan may (MAY!) have some kind of sexual/romantic history, if you believe blind items, and it did seem like a weird choice for Ryan’s career to simply do a cover album of all Tay-Tay. That being said, his covers are not bad at all. It definitely sounds like Bruce Springsteen Lite covers of Swift’s songs. You can hear “Shake It Off” here. You can hear “Wildest Dreams” here.

For her part, Taylor seemed genuinely excited when Ryan announced the cover album, and she tweeted and Instagrammed about it when it dropped. Ryan and Taylor also did a “conversation” together for GQ – go here to see (I’m also including it below). I sort of understand why Taylor is so happy about Ryan’s project – it’s because he obviously adores her and her music and since Tay-Tay is all about Tay-Tay, she obviously loves it when someone else is all about her too. In a new interview with the Guardian, Ryan talks more about the project and why he chose Taylor Swift’s album. And he compares her to Shakespeare. Oh, she’ll love that.

His favorite Taylor Swift song is “White Horse”: “The first time I heard it I got chills head to toe. I remember feeling shocked by her voice, shocked at how clean that song was. I like stuff that sort of penetrates through my regular consciousness and hits me where I’m not looking. That’s usually stuff that’s a little darker. You know, that song is really about disillusionment on such a grand scale. I just thought about how this is hitting me like a tidal wave, it’s so romantic and so beautiful, and yet so sad and so disillusioned – it’s all the stuff I love about the Smiths. That song f–ked me up and I couldn’t believe it. Her voice does this thing. It just goes through all my bullsh-t detectors and right into my heart and soul.”

Swifty as Shakespeare: He compares the exercise of working through 1989’s songs to “being in Ghostbusters or something, and then all of a sudden I have to go do Shakespeare”. As in, his material is the goofy franchise, hers is the oeuvre of the greatest writer that ever lived. It’s possibly an overgenerous analogy. “Well, look, those songs are popular for a reason,” he says. “She’s a popular artist for a reason.”

The criticism that he’s “mansplaining” Taylor Swift: “[It] really upset me. I honestly never thought about gender.”

Why he did the cover album: “It sounds very selfish and it is – I thought about Ryan. I projected into this universe. And the songs were this spacecraft that took me into this parallel universe. It was very cathartic for me, because I found myself singing those songs and feeling things from my divorce, [Adams split from the actress Mandy Moore in January this year] feeling things from a current relationship, feeling things from the distant past.”

He accepts this: “People will give me a certain amount of sh-t no matter what I do in my career. That’s just the role I play in music culture. It’s always going to be that way.”

[From The Guardian]

For what it’s worth, I don’t think his goal was to “mansplain” Taylor Swift’s songs. I think it was more like his particular song-writing well was dry and he thought it would be cool to do a cover album for an artist he enjoys. As for Taylor-as-Shakespeare. No. Just… NO. She is not Shakespeare. Adele is not Shakespeare either. If you really have to compare a modern singer/lyricist to Shakespeare, I would go with Bob Dylan, but maybe that’s just me.

Here’s their GQ conversation.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.