How Ryan Adams wound up covering Taylor Swift's '1989'

Brian Mansfield | USA TODAY

Before Ryan Adams considered covering a Taylor Swift album, he wrote a song with her.

Adams, who released a track-by-track remake of Swift's blockbuster 1989 Monday, got a call from Swift while she was writing songs for her 2012 album Red, asking if they could work on a song together.

"She basically already had this thing done," says Adams, a prolific singer-songwriter and five-time Grammy nominee whose music Swift has said helped shape her songwriting. "I just sat down and went, 'What about this?' And 'What about this?' We worked on a bridge, and we finished it. I guess I was the guy who could call people that would come in around 11 or 12 to jam."

Swift never released that song, but that session gave Adams an inside look into the creative process of one of the world's biggest pop stars. While Adams believes the two share a kindred songwriting sense — "I joke that we're the F to A Minor Club," he says — he's also a little in awe of her ability to craft songs that speak to massive audiences and individuals alike.

"There's that special, very interesting ingredient where you hear a skeleton of the song, just the bones, and her voice, and you go, 'Well, of course, this person plays to 60,000 people.' It's like at the end of Dune, with Paul Atreides riding the Sandworm, and his eyes are all blue from the spice mélange. That's totally how I see Taylor."

Adams, 40, went public with his admiration of Swift in 2012, shortly after she released We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, posting on Twitter that "every tune of hers is like the one you wait a whole lifetime to write."

I am totally blown away by that new @taylorswift13 song. Every tune of hers is like the one you wait a whole lifetime to write. #Awesome — Ryan Adams (@TheRyanAdams) August 31, 2012

When Swift released 1989 last fall just a week before Adams turned 40, he took his admiration to the next level.

"I had been listening to 1989 off and on, and I could hear what I thought was a sort of pain in there," he says. "Maybe I only just saw it that way, but I could hear the lyrics, and I thought, 'There's something in there, and I want to know how far it goes.'"

Adams, who's recorded covers of acts including Alice in Chains, Oasis and Vampire Weekend, decided he'd try to remake Swift's album in its entirety.

He began recording on a four-track cassette deck from the '80s, much as Bruce Springsteen had done with 1982's Nebraska. Unfortunately, the machine wound up eating his tape four songs in, destroying those performances forever.

"Before I knew anything had happened, the tape had come loose inside, the machine grabbed it, and it was just so mangled," he says.

Adams soon set out on his next tour and so couldn't restart his project for several months.

In August, Adams began posting pictures of new sessions, this time with a full band using higher-caliber equipment in his Los Angeles studio. After Swift heard about the project and tweeted, "I WILL PASS OUT," Adams began posting snippets of several 1989 songs, including a subdued version of Bad Blood and an arrangement of Shake It Off in a minor key, setting off a social-media frenzy among both artists' fan bases.

During the three weeks it took for Adams to record and mix his version of 1989, he and Swift were texting behind the scenes. "Taylor was like, 'Are you going to put this out? Because you should,'" he says.

Where Swift's version of 1989 — which has sold more than 5.2 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan — is a massive, big-beat pop production. Adams' take, on the other hand, has the sparseness and introspection of indie-rock.

"For me, the sonic geography of this record is like a combination of The Smiths' Meat Is Murder and (Springsteen's) Darkness on the Edge of Town," Adams says. That's how I felt it: Mysterious and romantic, but, at the same time, brooding, with some sharp edges and a lot of fog, a lot of rain. I could feel all those things in me when I thought of her songs and the lyrics. I could feel them wanting to manifest in the arrangements."

So Wildest Dreams transforms into a jangly guitar rocker, and Out of the Woods becomes a waltz featuring an old Estey pump organ. Welcome to New York echoes Springsteen, and Adams' Fender Stratocaster guitars on I Know Places sound like something out of a spaghetti Western. By stripping away the instrumentation on Blank Space and omitting the line about making the bad guys good for a weekend, Adams also removes the song's dark humor, turning into a plea of almost predestined sadness.

If 1989 was an '80s-era shopping mall, Swift and Adams would be hanging out in different wings. "I remember thinking we were going in from the J.C. Penney side, where the record store and arcade were," Adams says.

By emphasizing the sadder aspect of Swift's songs, Adams' 1989 has the feel of a break-up album, certainly more than Swift's version does. "I suppose there's some of that in there," says Adams, who filed for divorce from singer/actress Mandy Moore earlier this year. Though he says the end of his marriage of nearly six years had a greater bearing on the songs he wrote for a pair of albums recorded before 1989 but being released afterward, "there's some residual energy left over from that in this record, definitely."

More than that, though, Adams found the 1989 project to be cathartic. "I'm a singer-songwriter diving into somebody's work, which felt really liberating," he says. "I had so much on my mind and so much in my heart and soul that, bizarrely, singing her songs on that record, I could let go even a little more than I have on my own stuff lately. Somehow, it let me say some stuff I really needed to say that I didn't even know I needed to say."

In addition, he says, "It felt like I had given this person this cool gift: "Hey, here's your songs from this different perspective.' That's good for everybody. That's totally what music is."