Turnabout’s fair play as someone covers a Ryan Adams album in the style of Taylor Swift

Okay, let’s see if we can do this without having to draw a chart. Back in 2014, Taylor Swift released her fifth studio album, 1989—you might remember it from it being an unstoppable, unkillable cultural juggernaut. The next year, in an act of bizarre (but enthusiastic) tribute, singer-songwriter Ryan Adams released a full album of Smiths-y covers of the songs on 1989, also titled 1989. (Then, Father John Misty released his own cover of Adams’ covers of Swift’s songs in the style of the Velvet Underground, but if we get bogged down in all the trolling FJM does on a daily basis, we’re never going to get through this thing.)

Now it’s 2016, and all of our participants have gone their separate musical ways. But in the world of dueling covers, turnabout is always fair play, and so it’s oddly unsurprising to learn that a band in Brooklyn has covered one of Adams’ albums—2004’s Love Is Hell—in the style of Taylor Swift. Babetown—a.k.a. husband-wife duo Jessica Leibowitz and Danny Ross—does a pretty great job capturing Swift’s enthusiastic, poppy sounds, turning Adams’ perpetual sonic frown upside down. And, for what it’s worth, Adams seems to think game recognizes game, praising the album on social media:

You can hear the entirety of 1989 Is Hell on Babetown’s Soundcloud page, but you can listen to Babetown’s version of “Wonderwall”—which, to be clear, is a riff on Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” that’s also an alt-rock take on an Oasis song, performed by a couple of people in an apartment in Brooklyn—right here, provided your head’s stopped spinning from that description: