Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	69/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
American Songwriter
The A.V. Club	A-
The Boston Globe	Positive
Entertainment Weekly	A-
Los Angeles Times	Positive
Pitchfork	4/10
Slant Magazine
Sputnikmusic	3.9/5
The Telegraph

1989 is the fifteenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, released digitally through his own PAX AM record label on September 21, 2015. The album is a track-by-track cover of Taylor Swift's album of the same name. It debuted at number 7 on the US Billboard 200 chart, one position ahead of Swift's 1989, which was in its 48th week on the chart.

Adams first became interested in Taylor Swift's album while coping with the collapse of his marriage to Mandy Moore. On what attracted him about Swift's album, Adams stated "There's just a joy to 1989," describing the album as "its own alternate universe." Adams initially described the album as being in the style of The Smiths. When recording the album, Adams said he found a sound somewhere between Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town and The Smiths' Meat Is Murder.

On the day that Adams announced the project, Swift responded enthusiastically from her Twitter account, saying "Cool I'm not gonna be able to sleep tonight or ever again and I'm going to celebrate today every year as a holiday."

Two weeks later, an official statement was released via Entertainment Weekly, whereupon Swift expressed further excitement and anticipation:

"Ryan Adams is one of the artists who shaped my songwriting. My favorite part of his style of creating music is his ability to bleed aching vulnerability into it, and that’s what he’s done with his cover project of my album 1989. When I first heard that Ryan was going to be covering my entire album, I couldn’t believe it. It’s such an honor that he would want to take my stories and lyrics and give them a new life. He’s gotten some of the best musicians together to record this album and if the clips he’s released are any indication, this is going to be something really special."

One month later, on Zane Lowe's Beats 1 radio show with Adams and a surprise appearance from Swift a day after the album was released, Swift lavished praise and adulation upon Adams' work, and expressed the ways in which his interpretation of the songs differs from her own, stating that "they’re not cover songs" in the commonly expected sense. "They’re reimaginings of my songs, and you can tell that he was in a very different place emotionally when he put his spin on them than I was when I wrote them. There’s this beautiful aching sadness and longing in this album that doesn’t exist in the original." In the same interview, she also admitted that (after having spent time listening to an advance copy of his album) some of Adams' melodies were beginning to pervade her songs during touring performances.

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Wikipedia