Ryan Adams Is Covering Taylor Swift's <em>1989</em> Album & It's Beautiful

Welcome to New York, New York

Ryan Adams has been in the studio recording his own versions of every song from Taylor Swift's most recent release, 1989. This kind of thing has been done before, and it's been done its best by Adams himself (remember Wonderwall?), who seems to have a knack for turning good pop songs into something that sounds a little more important, or depressing, or meaningful.

Over the weekend he shared a couple of clips through late night tweets, giving us a taste of "Bad Blood" stripped away from its hyped-up, celebrity-filled blockbuster video, and bringing it down to its bare bones. And the bones are good—Adams declared the song, from a songwriters perspective, to be "unreal."

He also shared a little bit of "Out of the Woods":

Stereogum notes, "In what initially seemed like a joke but has now become gloriously real, Ryan Adams has spent the past few days recording a full-length cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. He’s almost halfway through the tracklist by now... most of the songs are supposedly in the style of the Smiths, but this one is more straight Ryan Adams, and he calls it a Heartbreaker sounding version." But what in the world is he going to do with "Welcome to New York"? He already wrote his own anthem to the city in 2001.