Ryan Adams takes on Taylor Swift's '1989'

In John Seabrook's The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, the New Yorker writer explains why so many songs that top the American pop and R&B charts are created by a small group of mostly Scandinavian songwriter-producers. Toward the end, he gets around to the subject of Taylor Swift.

One of the main characters in The Song Machine (W.W. Norton, $26.95) is Max Martin, the song doctor who once fronted a glam metal band called It's Alive! He has credits on more than 50 Top 10 hits. That's more than Elvis Presley, The Beatles or Madonna.

The bearded Swede, born Martin Karl Sandberg, got together with Swift to write "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," the biggest hit from the Wyomissing native's still-kinda country 2012 album, Red. So when Swift decided the now enormously successful 1989 - a staggering 5 million-plus copies sold so far - would be her "first official documented pop album," it made sense that she would choose to work with the hitmaker.

Sure enough, if you peruse the credits of 1989, you'll find seven of the 13 tracks bear a Martin writing and production credit. That doesn't mean Swift songs like "Shake It Off," "Blank Space," and "Wildest Dreams" lost their personal touch.

On the contrary, as Seabrook puts it, "In Swift, the Swedish master may have found his ultimate collaborator: an artist strong enough to stand up for her vision, but canny enough to appreciate his genius." But Seabrook was also impressively prescient about the increased universality of Swift's Martin-ized songs. He wrote: "Still for the first time Swift's hit songs sound like anyone could have sung them."

Enter Ryan Adams. Not that Adams is just anyone. He's the scruffy not-to-be-confused-with-Bryan 40-year-old Americana songwriter and former leader of Whiskeytown who has put out an average of an album a year since releasing his best one, Heartbreaker, in 2000.

He has dominated Internet music chatter since he released his own full-length track-by-track cover of 1989 (PAX AM) last Sunday. Adams began working on the album last winter as his since-dissolved marriage to former teen pop star Mandy Moore was falling apart. The product has been wholeheartedly endorsed by Swift. When Adams was guesting on Zane Lowe's Beats 1 radio show on Apple Music, Swift called in to praise Adams' alt versions.

Swift said Adams' takes on "Blank Space" and "How You Get the Girl" are "reimaginings of my songs . . .. There's this beautiful aching sadness and longing in this album that doesn't exist in the original."

Maybe not, or at least it's not on the surface of Swift's largely upbeat 1989. The album works well enough as a throwback tribute to the synth-centric sounds of the year she was born while defining the mainstream in 2015.

The 1980s were in part about bright and shiny pop songs like the Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy," to which Swift makes her entrance on tour. But they were also about the emotive post-punk and roots-rock that Adams was raised on, such as the soul balladry of unkempt bands like the Replacements and broody hit-radio fare by Bruce Springsteen at his "I'm on Fire" commercial apotheosis.

Adams rearranges the music and makes it more downcast. His quavering vocal at the end of "Shake It Off" makes you worry that just the act of singing might cause him to collapse in a heap on stage. And he's been effusive in his praise of Swift, whom he, in various interviews, has compared to Bob Mould of the great 1980s punk band Hüsker Dü, as well as Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix

On 1989, Adams largely rises to the challenge of finding an emotional center he can empathize with in songs written by a female songwriter 15 years his junior. He couldn't resist one lyrical tweak, though: Instead of singing "You've got that James Dean daydream look in your eye," on "Style," he nods to Sonic Youth's classic 1988 album with "Daydream Nation look in your eye." But he's otherwise man enough to show his unabashed fanboy appreciation of a pop star whose massive audience is largely made up of girls less than half his age.

Or maybe I mean smart enough: 1989 stands to bring Adams, at least for the time being, a fresh new audience. After more than a decade of being known as a highly prolific act whose new songs don't resonate the way his old ones did, he's suddenly a trending topic on Twitter. On Thursday, he'll be Trevor Noah's first musical guest on Comedy Central's rebooted The Daily Show.

Swift is in no need of the imprimatur of a perceived-as-serious artist like Adams. But the new 1989 does make the domain she is master of grow ever larger. Now even grumpy old pop-music-hating dudes might give her a hearing.

When Adams announced 1989 would be recorded "in the style of the Smiths," there was much speculation that it was a joke. The project has generated its share of laughs. Last week, merry prankster Father John Misty briefly released his own takes on "Blank Space" and "Shake It Off," recorded "in the style of the Velvet Undergound," featuring a spot-on Lou Reed imitation. A day later, he took them down, saying the late Uncle Lou appeared in a dream and told him to do so.

Adams' 1989 works because the Swift tunes - penned with other writing partners like Ryan Tedder and Jack Antonoff, as well as Martin - are such well-constructed pop songs. They can easily withstand being reworked. "We're sandblasting them," Adams said in a tweet to Swift in August. "And they're holding steady."

But it's also because they're delivered with sincerity. Recording a complete 53-minute cover version of the most popular album in the world sounds like a lark at first, a clever art project. Adams understood, though, that if he succumbed to irony, the album wouldn't have stood up to repeat listening.

"You just have to mean it," he explained to Rolling Stone, stating the first prerequisite for making any remake worth doing. "As I was singing those songs, they mattered to me as much as any of my own songs ever did."

ddeluca@phillynews.com

215-854-5628 @deluca_dan