Ryan Adams
Gold
»
Ryan Adams
Gold
Lost Highway, 2001
RiYL: Whiskeytown, Joe Henry, Wilco |
Looking at himself from the third person, Adams croons: "And everybody wants to see you suffer / they know that you need the pain so much / they throw you a rope when you're too high / to cruise baby / Lord, you lose lady / Then they charge you with the rescue blues."
While it's not a direct hit, he does take issue with all those who expect so much from Adams the songwriter. They want him to be the guy from Whiskeytown, the brash alt.country band from North Carolina that only a few years ago was supposed to blow the scene wide open.
But the band quickly imploded with the trace of success of its 1997 album Strangers Almanac, and Adams drifted nearly to oblivion just as all the lonely 20-something guys out there thought they may have found their Bob Dylan. Quiet lamenting songs like "Inn Town" and "Avenues" were magnets for just about every dispossessed kid looking for someone who appeared to understand what they were going through (heartbreak, hopelessness, drinking). This Ryan Adams kid was their age, going through their problems, and expressing them in ways no one could.
The problem, though, was simply that Adams was their age, and just as insecure as his fans. He struggled with being pinned down as anyone's spokesman, and broke up Whiskeytown shortly after finishing Pneumonia, the follow-up to Strangers.
Pneumonia, released posthumously this past May, clearly found Adams struggling with his identity, and while it is a strong album, it lacked the cohesiveness of its predecessor. Sure, the moody songs were still there, but they were tossed in with such experimental numbers like "Paper Moon" and "Mirror, Mirror." Sensing the end of the road, Adams broke up the band with little fanfare in 1999.
From there, he turned inward and released the dark, quiet, folk-driven solo album Heartbreaker last year. The album was the most personal of his short career, and offered a glimpse of the man's soul. Gone were the drown-in-my-beer, my-life-sucks-and-it's-your-fault tunes from earlier. Instead, Adams took the heartbreak left over from a former lover, internalized it, and created some of the starkest, most brutally honest songs written in years. It doesn't take a genius to spot the desperation in songs like "My Winding Wheel," "Why Do They Leave" and "Amy."
Heartbreaker was clearly a transitional album, but then, just about everything about Adams is transitional. He writes songs faster than Jeff George gets cut from NFL teams. He is famous for playing songs in concert that he wrote that day. He's got a backlog of unreleased material that would put Woody Guthrie to shame.
And of course, someone who writes so many songs is bound to produce a few clunkers. While his new album Gold is a remarkably consistent and solid effort, it is harmed by Adams' overambition to write and record almost everything that comes through his head. A 16-song effort that spans more than 70 minutes, the record could quite possibly be one of the best of the year with a dash of self-control.
The album starts out strong: from the uplifting, upbeat opener "New York, New York" through the pensive "La Cienega Just Smiled," the first four songs find Adams in his clearest mindset since Strangers Almanac. The songs are straightforward and he takes few chances, sticking with the straight-up rock songs he does best. "New York, New York" even opens with a Pete Townsend-esque riff before it fades into an uptempo number recalling his fondness for the Big Apple.
But after hitting its stride with the aforementioned "Rescue Blues," Gold stumbles into overindulgence with the plodding "Somehow, Someday," the incredibly long-winded "Nobody Girl" (all nine minutes of it), and the decrepit "Sylvia Plath." It is here where Gold becomes less of an album and more of a stream of consciousness novel in which Adams takes everyone along for the ride.
Experimentation does not fail him everywhere, though, as he hits a chord with the feedback-drenched "Enemy Fire" and the desperate "Wild Flowers,"which contains a line that might best represent where Adams is taking the craft (or, more appropriately, where the craft is taking Adams):
"Handcuffed hard to the wheel / and steering wildly / through love's fields, so blindly."
Clearly, the man is a gifted songwriter. And as with all the great ones, not everything he records is going to be brilliant. Sometimes it's not even likable. But when it works, like on "La Cienega Just Smiled," "Rescue Blues," and "When the Stars Go Blue," Gold makes it obvious that Adams is worth the trouble.
RODEO ROB | An expert on all things "alt," Rob spends his days covering the energy industry and his nights covering the DC-area bars. Raise yer glass especially high to this man, for he has contributed to this site constantly since its creation four years ago.