Ryan Adams: The best singer-songwriter you’ve never heard of
January 30, 2004 | 12:00am
In Ryan Adams’ cosmology love and doom are the same four-letter word we are all in between heartaches.
You may be staring at yourPenny Lane now (I don’t know what the appropriate archetype is for the other sex), sharing ice cream and bed sheets, trading saliva and stares, obliterating selves and the rest of the f*cking world. You may be doing other sickening etceteras of love. But always remember what Plato, Ambrose Pierce, Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians once said about everything being temporary. It is, really. "Nothing lasts forever and we both know hearts can change," a tattooed philosopher in stupid cycling shorts once sang. Something that is as inflexible as the laws of physics.
Everyone knows love is a wanderer: It flits like a fly from shit to shit; it disappears suddenly from hearts like Batman; it leaves skid marks like unbearably gray November on one’s soul. Just when you thought you found "the one," the one puts one over you. Lots of songwriters wrote whole albums about the depressing tangents of relationships and breakups. Bob Dylan for all his sermons on the folk-rock mount will be remembered (fondly) for "Blood on the Tracks," an album which documents love, loss and everything in between. The same with Elton John, The Smiths, Beck, The Cure and Jeff Buckley, who all have charted the rise, the fall and the burning down of emotional empires in song, who each has stood over the decaying "corpses of murdered relationships."
Love is a doomed enterprise, no doubt about that. And listening to alt.country wonder boy Ryan Adams’ music – particularly the songs on "Love is Hell Pt. 1" and "Pt.2" – is like being haunted by the ghosts of breakups past and breakups future.
A short history is in order. Ryan Adams is the former singer/songwriter/guitarist of alt.country darlings Whiskeytown, which disbanded in ’99 after churning out a couple of platters. Adams went solo and came up with "Heartbreaker," a breakup album of startling, stark, sincere, astonishing, countrified ditties that recall artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Morrissey, Van Morrison, Jeff Buckley, the Replacements, the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Gram Parsons (the late great purveyor of "Cosmic American Music").
If you think country music is confined to Country & Western fluff like Billy Ray Cyrus or Shania Twain, think again. My haughty, achy-breaky ears automatically heard hee-haws and shitty square-dancing music when I stumbled upon C&W titles. But that was before I discovered Gram Parsons’ "GP," "Grievous Angel," Flying Burrito Brothers albums, Bob Dylan’s "Nashville Skyline," as well as alt.country gems like Wilco’s "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot."
Like Parsons before him, Adams is a creator of big bleeding heart ballads. "Heartbreaker" (September 2000) is in the same mold as Beck’s excellent "Sea-Change," another record that reinforces the notion that transcendent music can be created with an acoustic guitar, coffee, cigarettes and a heartache.
"Heartbreaker" begins with a debate about a Morrissey song – a sort of foreboding about the forthcoming cuts that are inspired by the Great White Mope and other luckless lovers.
One of my favorites is Come Pick Me Up with its eloquent lines, "When you’re walking downtown/Do you wish I was there?/Do you wish it was me?/With the windows clear and the mannequins’ eyes/Do they all look like mine?/I wish you would/Come pick me up…" Think Morrissey’s Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me or There Is A Light That Never Goes Out with Dylan zealously playing harmonica. "I wish I could…" Adams concludes, which is as sad as Radiohead’s "And if I could be who you wanted…" from Fake Plastic Trees.
Another great song is Why Do They Leave? Here, sad-eyed Ryan sings, "Simple cards and things/Rose-colored sunsets no flowers for me/Lover, why do you leave?/On the day I want you for me…" Something as poignant as Jeff Buckley’s Lover, You Should Have Come Over.
To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High) is cut from the same cloth as Dylan’s Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts. Amy, an unabashed ballad, has those eerie strings (reportedly made by a string simulator). Oh My Sweet Carolina features Emmylou Harris on backing vocals, thus evoking the spirit of Gram Parsons. (Harris and Parsons sang together on the lilting Song For You on "GP".)
Most of Ryan Adams’ songs in "Heartbreaker" are about trying to make love stay, which is the topic of great literature, the solver of great secrets, according to Tom Robbins in Still Life With Woodpecker.
And if "Heartbreaker" is Ryan Adams’ depression diary, "Gold" (Sept., 2001) finds him making his supposedly shiny pop record. Well, sort of.
Although the album begins with the upbeat, very poppy New York, New York (which has acquired a deeper dimension because of 9/11), and followed by the bouncy Firecracker and the breezy Answering Bell, there are still bleak, Ryan Adams moments on the album.
Just like La Cienega Just Smiled, with its Toto-like rhythm guitars and oblique lyrics. Rescue Blues finds Ryan mining the same territory that Bryan Adams squats in – big and slick lovelorn ballads. When Stars Go Blue provides yuppie icons The Corrs with a lilting cover. Goodnight, Hollywood Blvd. reminds us of a young Elton John, sitting in front of a piano, ruminating, slowly.
One of my favorites is the epic Nobody Girl (sort of conceptual partner to The Beatles’ Nowhere Man). Another is Sylvia Plath about the tragic poetess. Still another is Harder Now That It’s Over, with the immortal lines, "It’s harder now that it’s over/Now that the cuffs are off and you’re free/Free with a history."
Talk about turning emotional crap into "Gold."
Do not, I repeat, do not take this album seriously.
"Rock N Roll" is a lightweight album compared to past opuses, according to Uncut. Here, Adams sheds his alt.country poster-boy image like Leonard Cohen’s famous blue raincoat and dabbled. "It’s as if Ryan Adams recorded this album with a gun to his head," to paraphrase rock journalist Allan Jones. Adams submitted his new recordings (later to appear in the two "Love is Hell" EPs) to his record label as follow up to the smash "Gold." They got rejected because they were "incredibly depressing." So, he jammed with some cohorts, hooked up with Courtney Love’s boyfriend/producer, and came up with neurotic rock karaoke.
"Rock N’ Roll," released last year, is one of the few really derivative shit I truly enjoy. Not derivative in the Lenny Kravitz or Black Crowes sense, but more about an artist finding inspiration in the past masters of depressing rock, giving listeners the urge to ask, "Will the real Ryan Adams please stand up and wear his id on his sleeve?"
Each song is ghosted by a rock n’ roll presence: This Is It (The Strokes), Shallow (Oasis), 1974 (Alice Cooper), Wish You Were Here (38 Special, Rick Springfield), So Alive (U2), Luminol (Goo Goo Dolls), Note to Self: Don’t Die (Nirvana, obviously), Anybody Wanna Take Me Home (Morrissey), etc.
The great thing about this feel-good platter is that it made me realize hard rock and new wave influences could co-exist in harmony in one musician – like Morrissey getting along famously with Keith Richards. And I guess a lackluster Ryan Adams is better than, say, John Mayer in top form.
In the title track, Adams sings, "Everybody’s cool playing rock n’ roll/I don’t feel cool at all." A statement that is both narcissistic and insecure.
In the two-part "Love is Hell" album, both released last year, Adams gives listeners a tour of his personal inferno. These EPs are his dark and drug-addled suicide records – nobody makes albums like these anymore. "Pt. 1" and "Pt. 2" are both bleak, rearview mirror post-mortems on relationships, both filled with bright words about loneliness, desolation, longing, cold Chelsea Hotel nights.
Music-wise, they are teeming with songs that are sparsely arranged, understated. It’s as if what’s essential is the sentiment, not the studio saccharine. Of course, in this day and age of superstar producer pomp, anachronistic folksy albums can’t possibly register platinum figures. ("My albums don’t even go balsa wood in some countries," Ryan was once quoted in a magazine.)
In "Pt. 1" Adams does a Coldplay-ish track called Political Scientist (Politik plus The Scientist equals…), complete with hovering celestial keyboards. Love is Hell is a more upbeat track that overshadows the screwed up sentiment: "I could be anything, nothing, whatever, oh well/Love is hell."
He also does a cover of Oasis’ Wonderwall – without the Britpop bombast, and with more introspective guitars and a raspier, infinitely sadder voice (not like Liam Gallagher’s chirpy whining). It is the best song to play to your girlfriend when the lights are low, nerves are getting frayed, and the inevitable apocalypse is right outside the window.
World War 24 is my favorite track in the first EP. It has psychedelic lyrics that are really inventive: "Coma comes like a bullet from a candy gun… She don’t even ask what time it is anymore/Dressed up like it’s World War 24." (What the f*ck does that mean? Oh well, total comprehension is overrated, anyway.") Another great cut is Avalanche, which also has elliptical lyrics. She falls apart in the avalanche fades out like a dance when it’s over. Listeners get the nagging feeling it’s also about a relationship reaching entropy.
"Pt. 2" picks up where the first left off. A standout track is Please Don’t Let Me Go, which recalls a young Van Morrison sitting on the bed, cigarette wedged between teeth, and saying everything to keep a woman from leaving. City Rain, City Streets reminds me of Johnny Marr’s giggly guitars and Paul Westerberg’s emotionally ambiguous musings. I See Monsters is as insightful as a Paul Simon composition.
But the best song for me in the "Love is Hell" sessions is Hotel Chelsea Nights with its big gospel chorus and big bluesy guitar. Here, Ryan Adams sings as if he’s strung out, down on his luck, depressed, drunk, dreaming of an improbable reunion with his girl, trying to get some sleep, trying to get through the night, trying to find redemption in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere, making sense of that stupid enterprise of loving and losing and loving and losing…
Hey, aren’t we all?
For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.
You may be staring at yourPenny Lane now (I don’t know what the appropriate archetype is for the other sex), sharing ice cream and bed sheets, trading saliva and stares, obliterating selves and the rest of the f*cking world. You may be doing other sickening etceteras of love. But always remember what Plato, Ambrose Pierce, Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians once said about everything being temporary. It is, really. "Nothing lasts forever and we both know hearts can change," a tattooed philosopher in stupid cycling shorts once sang. Something that is as inflexible as the laws of physics.
Everyone knows love is a wanderer: It flits like a fly from shit to shit; it disappears suddenly from hearts like Batman; it leaves skid marks like unbearably gray November on one’s soul. Just when you thought you found "the one," the one puts one over you. Lots of songwriters wrote whole albums about the depressing tangents of relationships and breakups. Bob Dylan for all his sermons on the folk-rock mount will be remembered (fondly) for "Blood on the Tracks," an album which documents love, loss and everything in between. The same with Elton John, The Smiths, Beck, The Cure and Jeff Buckley, who all have charted the rise, the fall and the burning down of emotional empires in song, who each has stood over the decaying "corpses of murdered relationships."
Love is a doomed enterprise, no doubt about that. And listening to alt.country wonder boy Ryan Adams’ music – particularly the songs on "Love is Hell Pt. 1" and "Pt.2" – is like being haunted by the ghosts of breakups past and breakups future.
A short history is in order. Ryan Adams is the former singer/songwriter/guitarist of alt.country darlings Whiskeytown, which disbanded in ’99 after churning out a couple of platters. Adams went solo and came up with "Heartbreaker," a breakup album of startling, stark, sincere, astonishing, countrified ditties that recall artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Morrissey, Van Morrison, Jeff Buckley, the Replacements, the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Gram Parsons (the late great purveyor of "Cosmic American Music").
If you think country music is confined to Country & Western fluff like Billy Ray Cyrus or Shania Twain, think again. My haughty, achy-breaky ears automatically heard hee-haws and shitty square-dancing music when I stumbled upon C&W titles. But that was before I discovered Gram Parsons’ "GP," "Grievous Angel," Flying Burrito Brothers albums, Bob Dylan’s "Nashville Skyline," as well as alt.country gems like Wilco’s "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot."
Like Parsons before him, Adams is a creator of big bleeding heart ballads. "Heartbreaker" (September 2000) is in the same mold as Beck’s excellent "Sea-Change," another record that reinforces the notion that transcendent music can be created with an acoustic guitar, coffee, cigarettes and a heartache.
One of my favorites is Come Pick Me Up with its eloquent lines, "When you’re walking downtown/Do you wish I was there?/Do you wish it was me?/With the windows clear and the mannequins’ eyes/Do they all look like mine?/I wish you would/Come pick me up…" Think Morrissey’s Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me or There Is A Light That Never Goes Out with Dylan zealously playing harmonica. "I wish I could…" Adams concludes, which is as sad as Radiohead’s "And if I could be who you wanted…" from Fake Plastic Trees.
Another great song is Why Do They Leave? Here, sad-eyed Ryan sings, "Simple cards and things/Rose-colored sunsets no flowers for me/Lover, why do you leave?/On the day I want you for me…" Something as poignant as Jeff Buckley’s Lover, You Should Have Come Over.
To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High) is cut from the same cloth as Dylan’s Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts. Amy, an unabashed ballad, has those eerie strings (reportedly made by a string simulator). Oh My Sweet Carolina features Emmylou Harris on backing vocals, thus evoking the spirit of Gram Parsons. (Harris and Parsons sang together on the lilting Song For You on "GP".)
Most of Ryan Adams’ songs in "Heartbreaker" are about trying to make love stay, which is the topic of great literature, the solver of great secrets, according to Tom Robbins in Still Life With Woodpecker.
And if "Heartbreaker" is Ryan Adams’ depression diary, "Gold" (Sept., 2001) finds him making his supposedly shiny pop record. Well, sort of.
Although the album begins with the upbeat, very poppy New York, New York (which has acquired a deeper dimension because of 9/11), and followed by the bouncy Firecracker and the breezy Answering Bell, there are still bleak, Ryan Adams moments on the album.
Just like La Cienega Just Smiled, with its Toto-like rhythm guitars and oblique lyrics. Rescue Blues finds Ryan mining the same territory that Bryan Adams squats in – big and slick lovelorn ballads. When Stars Go Blue provides yuppie icons The Corrs with a lilting cover. Goodnight, Hollywood Blvd. reminds us of a young Elton John, sitting in front of a piano, ruminating, slowly.
One of my favorites is the epic Nobody Girl (sort of conceptual partner to The Beatles’ Nowhere Man). Another is Sylvia Plath about the tragic poetess. Still another is Harder Now That It’s Over, with the immortal lines, "It’s harder now that it’s over/Now that the cuffs are off and you’re free/Free with a history."
Talk about turning emotional crap into "Gold."
"Rock N’ Roll," released last year, is one of the few really derivative shit I truly enjoy. Not derivative in the Lenny Kravitz or Black Crowes sense, but more about an artist finding inspiration in the past masters of depressing rock, giving listeners the urge to ask, "Will the real Ryan Adams please stand up and wear his id on his sleeve?"
Each song is ghosted by a rock n’ roll presence: This Is It (The Strokes), Shallow (Oasis), 1974 (Alice Cooper), Wish You Were Here (38 Special, Rick Springfield), So Alive (U2), Luminol (Goo Goo Dolls), Note to Self: Don’t Die (Nirvana, obviously), Anybody Wanna Take Me Home (Morrissey), etc.
The great thing about this feel-good platter is that it made me realize hard rock and new wave influences could co-exist in harmony in one musician – like Morrissey getting along famously with Keith Richards. And I guess a lackluster Ryan Adams is better than, say, John Mayer in top form.
In the title track, Adams sings, "Everybody’s cool playing rock n’ roll/I don’t feel cool at all." A statement that is both narcissistic and insecure.
Music-wise, they are teeming with songs that are sparsely arranged, understated. It’s as if what’s essential is the sentiment, not the studio saccharine. Of course, in this day and age of superstar producer pomp, anachronistic folksy albums can’t possibly register platinum figures. ("My albums don’t even go balsa wood in some countries," Ryan was once quoted in a magazine.)
In "Pt. 1" Adams does a Coldplay-ish track called Political Scientist (Politik plus The Scientist equals…), complete with hovering celestial keyboards. Love is Hell is a more upbeat track that overshadows the screwed up sentiment: "I could be anything, nothing, whatever, oh well/Love is hell."
He also does a cover of Oasis’ Wonderwall – without the Britpop bombast, and with more introspective guitars and a raspier, infinitely sadder voice (not like Liam Gallagher’s chirpy whining). It is the best song to play to your girlfriend when the lights are low, nerves are getting frayed, and the inevitable apocalypse is right outside the window.
World War 24 is my favorite track in the first EP. It has psychedelic lyrics that are really inventive: "Coma comes like a bullet from a candy gun… She don’t even ask what time it is anymore/Dressed up like it’s World War 24." (What the f*ck does that mean? Oh well, total comprehension is overrated, anyway.") Another great cut is Avalanche, which also has elliptical lyrics. She falls apart in the avalanche fades out like a dance when it’s over. Listeners get the nagging feeling it’s also about a relationship reaching entropy.
"Pt. 2" picks up where the first left off. A standout track is Please Don’t Let Me Go, which recalls a young Van Morrison sitting on the bed, cigarette wedged between teeth, and saying everything to keep a woman from leaving. City Rain, City Streets reminds me of Johnny Marr’s giggly guitars and Paul Westerberg’s emotionally ambiguous musings. I See Monsters is as insightful as a Paul Simon composition.
But the best song for me in the "Love is Hell" sessions is Hotel Chelsea Nights with its big gospel chorus and big bluesy guitar. Here, Ryan Adams sings as if he’s strung out, down on his luck, depressed, drunk, dreaming of an improbable reunion with his girl, trying to get some sleep, trying to get through the night, trying to find redemption in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere, making sense of that stupid enterprise of loving and losing and loving and losing…
Hey, aren’t we all?
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