Ryan Adams

One Liner: Alt country and rock and roll goodness by the ton
Wikipedia Genre: Rock, alternative country, folk rock 
Spotify Says Similar To: Whiskeytown and Josh Ritter
Home: Chicago, I think.

Poster Position: 26
Slot: Sunday at 4:30 pm

Thoughts: I really like Ryan Adams.  I know a bunch of people who really deeply dislike him, but I thought alt country starter band Whiskeytown was great and then later listened to Adam's solo album Gold more times than I can count.  The hardest things about liking Adams is that (1) he appears to be a big fat dickhead; and (2) he puts out so much damn music that he dilutes the excellent with the mediocre.  To that second point, here is his discography:

• Heartbreaker (2000)
• Gold (2001)
• Demolition (2002)
• Rock N Roll (2003)
• Love Is Hell (2004) [although this was actually released in two separate EPs and then later combined, which was annoying]
• Cold Roses (2005)
• Jacksonville City Nights (2005)
• 29 (2005)
• Easy Tiger (2007)
• Cardinology (2008)
• Orion (2010)
• III/IV (2010)
• Ashes & Fire (2011)
• Ryan Adams (2014)
• 1989 (2015)
• Prisoner (2017)

Almost an album a year.  And some of those albums, Gold, Heartbreaker, Easy Tiger, and Prisoner, have a bunch of excellent tunes on them.  But trying to keep up with all of that music makes your head spin and you stop wanting to keep track of which album is which.  I feel like Adams would benefit greatly by cutting back on the output and honing his best songs into his best albums instead of rapid firing them out.  He's been nominated for a couple Grammys, but has yet to bring home any statues.  (He also had a band for a bit called The Finger, and their album was called We Are Fuck You.  How can you not appreciate that artistry?)

Before I get to the solo world, let me provide a note on Whiskeytown.  The band only put out three albums, all with Adams as the frontman, before he left to pursue his solo stuff.  I remember seeing their ACL taping when I lived in Dallas, and absolutely falling for "16 Days" and "Yesterday's News."  I found those tracks on Napster and played the hell out of them as I also started to understand the Americana world through KHYI in Dallas, and so Whiskeytown just has the sound of Americana to me.  "16 Days" is greatness.

Great harmonies, excellent build up, just a solid song of longing.  But, that was then, this is the solo stuff that features just Adams (and likely his band the Cardinals).

2000's Heartbreaker has several songs that are also perfect pop rock Americana songs, like "Oh My Sweet Carolina," "Come Pick Me Up," and the Dylan-esque "To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)."  Of those three, I'm going to give you the longing lovely sadness of "Come Pick Me Up."  Has 12.9 million streams.

Damn, son.  I mean, that chorus of "Come pick me up. Take me out. Fuck me up. Steal my records. Screw all my friends. They're all full of shit. With a smile on your face. And then do it again. I wish you would."  Just gave me goosebumps listening to it again.  I don't know why, but the "steal my records" bit of that is the devastating portion I always remember, which is silly when compared to her boning all of his friends.  And when the start of "In My Time of Need" kicks up, I get all excited that Adams is covering Townes Van Zandt, but no such luck.  Very good album.

The 2001's Gold, which was released Sept. 25, 2001 added to that same type of rock/Americana sound, with more tender songs and more jangly, fun rock.  "New York, New York" was a love song to the city, released just right after the twin towers fell.  Not that it explicitly mentioned them, or 9/11 or whatever, it was just a pure love song to the city that hit at the right time.  "La Cienega Just Smiled" is a beauty, as is "Harder Now That Its Over" and "When the Stars Go Blue."  "Gonna Make You Love Me," "Answering Bell," the whole album is just full of good stuff.  I soundtracked two big road trips with this album right around then, one a drive from San Francisco to Austin in a convertible (which was an amazing trip, should you be so inclined) and the other a group-in-a-van trip to Salt Lake City for the winter Olympics.  So I have a lot of good memories of these tunes.  I'll give you the most listened-to track, the beauty "When the Stars Go Blue," which has 19.3 million streams.

That is a live version, with a guy named Neal Casal, which doesn't have the most pristine sound, but I liked the spare version with the double guitar picking.  So nice.  Also a very good album.  If you are trying to understand the Adams appeal, spend a few hours with those first two albums and see what you think.  

But then the next few albums (Demolition and Rock N Roll) were pretty forgettable and/or annoying. Nothing on Rock N Roll has more than a million streams, and most of the album is pretty shrill. Demolition was a collection of songs from several unreleased albums, and it has that lack of cohesion.  Love is Hell was the next one, which was released in two separate EPs, and I remember buying the first one without realizing that it was only part one and now I didn't have the whole album and I wanted the entire earth to burn in a blue fire from the anus of a dead dragon zombie.  But, I will admit that Love is Hell boasted a few good tracks that I liked, especially his cover of "Wonderwall," which I still use for playlists and is the version of that song I sing to my kids as a lullaby.  At 50 million streams, it is his most popular track on Spotify by a large margin.

So good.  I love Oasis in the first place, so this feeds me anyway, but that version of it is damn fine.  The next album was 2005's 29, and it was forgettable (and short), but the next one is his third best album in my opinion, 2007's Easy Tiger.  This one has "Two" and "Everybody Knows" as the "hits," even though they don't even really have that many plays in comparison to other hits.  "Two" is the one that was played all the time on local radio, but I like "Everybody Knows" better.  1.7 million streams.

The album is mostly a shuffling kind of alt country that barely ever really edges up to rock. Well, no, "Halloweenhead," rocks out, but the disc is mostly more chilled.  Like a good Neil Young album from the classic days.  Of note, Adams was apparently mixing heroin with cocaine and snorting it, along with abuse of alcohol and pills, during this period of his career. Holy shit man.  Having never done either, maybe I'm overreacting, but it seems like mixing horse with coke is a recipe for instant death that involves spraying blood from the nose. Don't do speedballs, kids.

Cardinology has him going in a more blues rock vein, like he had been listening to a lot of the Black Keys at the time.  "Fix It" was the radio hit from this one, which is pretty good too.  730k streams.

Hahahaha!  Look at the size of the amp behind him as he is playing.  THIS ONE GOES TO 11!  Live version, but you get the gist, more brawny rock than most of the tender tunes I've been showing you so far.  He did two more albums of music with the Cardinals, that strangely aren't included on Spotify.  But homeboy quit on the Cardinals (or disbanded them, or whatever) apparently partially because he was going to quit touring because he had Meniere's disease, which causes vertigo, tinnitus, and a feeling of fullness in the ear.  That sounds super shitty.  He probably got it from snorting weird shit.

During his hiatus, he married Mandy Moore (since divorced) and moved to LA.  When he actually decided that he was in to music after all, he released a "metal influenced" album called Orion, which Wikipedia says was issued on vinyl only.  So I've never heard it. And it seems like that might be a good thing.  

Strange thing, pretty sure I have never even heard of 2011's Ashes and Fire, much less actually heard the album, and yet the average song play count is significantly higher than either Easy Tiger or Cardinology.  I think I just got fatigued and quit trying out the new albums, but maybe I missed out here.  It makes me think of Norah Jones, with the pervasive piano licks in here, this is more of a laid back set of songs than the last few albums.  Ha! Wikipedia says that Norah Jones and Benmont Tench (from the Heartbreakers) were contributors to the album.  Pretty weird that Norah Jones is so distinctive on the piano, but she just is.  It's actually a pretty good album.

2014 brought us to the self-titled album, which goes back to the more guitar-centered sound, both in the acoustic ballads and the electric rockers, on the hits "Gimme Something Good" and "My Wrecking Ball."  Here is the latter, which fires up 10.4 million streams.

As usual, his ballads have such a deep sense of sadness to them.  I mean, I know that the lyrics themselves are kind of sad, but Adams does a damn good job of conveying emotion just through the arrangement that the lyrics live in.  Even if that was an instrumental, I feel like you'd know it was sad.

Among all of this time, by the way, if you feel like hearing some live Ryan Adams licks, the dude put out Live at Carnegie Hall, which has 42 tracks, as well as multiple albums called Live After Deaf, each with the city where they were recorded in the title, that provide hundreds more versions of his songs.  Its totally overwhelming.

2015 found the strangest release of all of these albums, and yet one of my personal favorites in the catalog.  Adams covered the entire Taylor Swift album 1989 - the whole thing, not just one song like a normal cover - and its actually pretty awesome.  I just had a conversation with someone about it, and we were both discussing how it created a new appreciation for just how great Taylor Swift is, because when all of the pop beats and electronic flourishes and breathy vocals are stripped away, you're left with some pretty damn solid lyrics that are relate able and well-crafted.  Adams just strips them down to the core, and it is great.  It's funny, because I've heard the originals many times in the car with my daughters, but to hear the hits transformed is kind of fascinating.  Here is "Bad Blood."

19.2 million streams for that song (while the original only has 16.2 million - because TayTay hates on Spotify and removed her stuff for a few years and only just recently reloaded it all. I bet the real streaming number for her album is three times the current population of the planet).  "Blank Space," "Shake it Off," "Wildest Dreams," "Out of the Woods," there are a bunch more of these versions by Adams that are really good.  

And finally you get to the most recent album, 2017's Prisoner (and the recently released 17-track long Prisoner B-Sides album also available on Spotify).  Three of the songs are already getting quite a bit of play around Austin, "Do You Still Love Me?," "Shiver and Shake," and "To Be Without You," each of which has just over 5 million streams.  I think, of the three, I prefer the last one.

Its funny.  Now that I look back at this post, I realize that many of these albums have a rocker that is popular and a more chilled tune that is popular, and pretty much without exception I seem to pick the chilled tune and not the rocker for my preferred track. Interesting.  BUT I WON'T APOLOGIZE!  SUCK IT, ROCKIN' RYAN FANS!  Actually, I like the rockin' songs too, but I think the ballads are just so damn good.

Going back to the point, very long ago in this post, that Adams is apparently a dickhead, Wikipedia lists a few different times that he courted CONTROVERSY, including an anecdote where he apparently got pissed off at a fan who yelled for him to play a Bryan Adams song, had the lights turned on, found the guy, paid him $30 as a refund for his ticket, and waited until he left the building.  Adams claims the guy was drunk and yelling during quiet parts of the set, but I like the first version better and plan to scream "CUTS LIKE A KNIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFE!!!" over and over during his set in October.  It'll be great.