Last Christmas, bored and needing a break from his own music, Ryan Adams found an old four-track cassette recorder and got an idea. Like millions of others, the 40-year-old Americana superstar had fallen hard for Taylor Swift’s 1989 on the album’s release last October.

“I was like, huh, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska was recorded on cassette four-track. So I thought, I should learn Taylor’s record, but record it in that style. The cassette tape broke while I was doing it, so all of that was abandoned. But I kept the idea.”

1989, the resulting song-by-song homage to Swift’s record (maybe “global cultural event” is a better way to refer to something that’s sold more than 8.6 million copies) is the prolific singer-songwriter’s 15th studio album in as many years and already one of his most talked about.

In August, Adams tweeted “Taylor Swift 1989 full album cover night 1. As played by the Smiths” and namechecked his bandmates. Swift responded: “is this true??????? I WILL PASS OUT.” Despite her blessing, the album has prompted plenty of controversy, mostly at the idea that, by taking Swift’s songs to what he describes as a “dark, different place”, Adams, the human jukebox of heartbreak, has somehow revealed Swift’s genius.

When Adams appears in the lobby of New York’s Crosby Street Hotel, his glasses are so hopelessly steamed up beneath a mop of shower-damp hair that he swipes them off and hands them to his tour manager. Looking somewhere between bewildered boy and volatile imp, he speaks in long bursts, with the urgency of someone who considers himself frequently misunderstood.

This project, he’s at pains to point out, was born out of a sincere love of Swift’s music. He names White Horse, from 2008’s Fearless, as the first song of hers that really moved him and talks about it with the wild-eyed immediacy of a superfan: “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.”

Ryan Adams performing in London in 2014. Photograph: Jim Dyson/WireImage

He continues: “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 fucked me up and I couldn’t believe it. Her voice does this thing. It just goes through all my bullshit detectors and right into my heart and soul.”

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.”

Of all the songs on Adams’s album, it’s Out of the Woods that delivers the sharpest shock. Not because the wind-machined, widescreen exaltation of the original implodes into something like a dolorous lullaby but because the lines, “The rest of the world was black and white / But we were in screaming colour” is a reminder of how excellent a lyricist Swift is. Which is the kind of observation that has led hordes of fans and critics to roll their eyes: why should it take a mopey man with a guitar to highlight how good a pop star’s craft is?

Anna Leszkiewicz, writing in the New Statesman, made a compelling case for Adams’s “mansplaining” of Taylor Swift. (The New Yorker praised the cover version having never reviewed the original, remarking that “these songs, rearranged by Adams, might sound to some ears more authentic, raw, or genuine”.) The reaction has, says Adams, “really upset me. I honestly never thought about gender.” And his pale eyes widen a bit, with alarm or guilelessness.

People will give me a certain amount of shit no matter what I do in my career. That's the role I play in music culture Ryan Adams

“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.”



Adams seems to accept that “people will give me a certain amount of shit 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.”

He grew up in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and began his music career fronting the alt-country band Whiskeytown but made his name, however, with a steady stream of solo records. Last year’s Ryan Adams was his 14th; heartache is, apparently, a never-ending reservoir for him. As fame grew, so did Adams’s reputation as a cranky performer and “difficult” personality.

“Even at a time of my life when I would do things that were maybe brash and crazy to other people, they really weren’t,” he says. “I was just this sensitive guy writing songs and I liked to party. I was just a guy in my late 20s playing guitar and raising hell, but there’s not that much craziness to it.”

Peak “craziness” came in 2006 when the critic Jim DeRogatis leaked a voicemail Adams left him after the former had written a not so nice review. The message, now notorious, ended: “old man it’s time for you to probably get out the fucking business.”

And Adams remains easy to wind up. During an innocuous chat about responses to 1989 he suddenly delivers a rant about “that fuckhead from the New York Times” that goes on for some minutes. He sounds like an embittered and petulant kid. But hear him talk about music and he becomes the ingenuous and pure-hearted artist that he wants the world to see. At several points he emphasises his professional contentment, as if keen to emphasise that his latest album is not some bid for reflected glory.

Taylor Swift in Toronto this month for her 1989 World Tour. Photograph: George Pimentel/Getty Images

He recounts casually how Swift invited him to collaborate on a song way back when she was working on Red. “She got a hold of me, and she came over, and we just dove into a tune. It was already a great tune, I didn’t need to do anything to it. I just kind of messed around it. We finished it and it was great.” As for whether that song will ever emerge: “Well, it’s her song. It’s not for me to say.”

He compares himself and Swift to astronauts. “Some of us just go up and we work on the satellites, we do some space walks and we go back to Earth. Then there’s the Neil Armstrongs – those folks that go to the moon. They’re awesome. I’m just a dude who works on the satellites. And I’m happy with that. At least I get to go to space.”