Ryan Adams, an often divisive figure in the music industry, has rarely refrained from speaking his inner truth to anyone willing to listen. That candidness, as put on full display on his recent Taylor Swift covers album, has now gifted us with additional thoughts from Ryan on the true cultural value of Swift's catalog. "I remember feeling shocked by her voice," Adams tells the Guardian in a interview, recounting the moment he realized Taylor was absolutely killing it and might very well be the present-dayShakespeare. "I like stuff that sort of penetrates through my regular consciousness and hits me where I'm not looking."
The shining moment in the discussion arrives when Ryan compares his usual creative output to the greatest franchise of all time (Ghostbusters. Duh.), in stark contrast to that Shakespeare guy:
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.”
Ryan also lands a pretty solid astronaut metaphor, though the real beauty of all this is that it kind of sounds like he's just describing Bill Murray's recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live:
