Watch Ryan Adams Cover Taylor Swift on ‘Daily Show’
Ryan Adams helped cap off Trevor Noah’s first week behind the desk at The Daily Show Thursday night as the host’s first musical guest.
Adams performed songs from his album of Taylor Swift covers, 1989. Thursday’s performance saw the musician play his wistful take on Swift’s drum-heavy “Bad Blood,” while several more tracks and a small interview appeared as online exclusives. Adams told Noah about the recording process and how the band put the album together in three weeks.
“We have a studio in L.A., and it’s an all-analog studio so we do things differently,” he said. “You have to basically play in real time, and we don’t do anything in computers. If you can’t really do it in real life, you can’t really do it at all.”
“I beg to differ,” Noah added. “I can do things on computers that I cannot do in real life.” Adams and his band then launched into their rough, Springsteen-esque take on “Style” as well as their sweet, acoustic “Blank Space” cover. He dedicated the latter to “Sandra Bullock’s character in the movie The Net,” a 1995 thriller about a computer programmer whose colleagues keep dying.
Adams’ 1989 came out last month, just days after he previewed his stripped-down takes on Swift’s poppiest album yet on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 radio show with the official release of “Bad Blood.” On the day of 1989‘s release, Father John Misty released his own “reinterpretation of the classic Ryan Adams album 1989.” On his SoundCloud, he released a cover of “Blank Space” and “Welcome to New York” sung in the style of Lou Reed before taking it down the next day, citing a dream about an enraged Lou Reed as his motivation to delete the tracks.