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Ryan Adams fans?
miller8966
Posts: 1,452
Ive been really getting into his stuff lately..heart breaker is just amazing. ANyone else a fan?
America...the greatest Country in the world.
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miller8966
Posts: 1,452
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EV
Toronto Film Festival 9/11/2007, '08 - Toronto 1 & 2, '09 - Albany 1, '11 - Chicago 1
I got a question for you; the only albums i have of his are gold and heartbreaker. What should i pick up next?
EV
Toronto Film Festival 9/11/2007, '08 - Toronto 1 & 2, '09 - Albany 1, '11 - Chicago 1
naděje umírá poslední
Wouldn't that make you a 'fan'?
everytime i have to take a crap i sing EVACUATION!!!
EVACUATION!!
"i'll let you be in my dream if i can be in your dream." -b.dylan
I like his music, that's all.
I'm a pearl jam fan, pearl jam is a big part of my life. When I'm away I miss their music, their music is always in my head etc... you probably know what I mean...
I don't even have a Ryan Adams album and I don't really want one, it would be nice but it's not that important...
naděje umírá poslední
I've seen this stated before and I always say that the phrasing in Casey Jones (which is what Ryan "rips" from that song) is classic delta blues phrasing, sung in many, many songs. I don't hear what you're talking about regarding Highway 61 other than it being blues. While we're talking about the Dead, Ryan is great friends with Phil Lesh and has been playing with him at his shows quite a bit as of late.
I'm not saying Ryan doesn't wear his influences on his sleeve. Before I really "got" him, I couldn't stand To Be Young cause it sounded so much like Dylan. I just suddenly one day realised the beauty of the song itself rather than what it sounded like.
Ryan's great and he has SO much unreleased material it's insane. To have it all (I've been downloading torrents for the last month and still don't have it all) would double your collection easy.
Cold Roses is my favorite Ryan album, and my favorite album from 2005. I find it perfect from start to finish. I would say if I had to rank it would go:
1. Cold Roses
2. Jacksonville City Nights
3. Heartbreaker (Can you tell I like the Alt-Country stuff the best?)
4. Love is Hell (Part 2 kind of drags, otherwise it would probably be my favorite)
5. 29 (once I listen to it more, it'll probably climb the rankings)
6. Gold
7. Demolition
8. Rock n Roll (too many songs that sound the same on this one to me)
There is just so much good stuff that he has, it's hard to say what my favorite song is, because there are so many for different moods.
Oh yeah...Whiskeytown is fucking awesome. It's what really started my exploration into Alt-Country.
Cold roses is brilliant everyone seems to like that. I'm a big fan of love is hell too though.
I like most of his stuff, but haven't gotten around to getting Jacksonville or 29 yet...
Nice sig. Poloroid. See what develops.
he released 3 albums in 2005, which are, coincidentally, the best 3 albums released in 2005.
pure genius.
The Times February 17, 2006
Dead man walking
By Pete Paphides
Ryan Adams reveals how he channelled thoughts of suicide into song
It’s already 6pm and the Kensington hotel’s 6.15pm yoga session is looking unlikely for Ryan Adams. With rehearsals for the first night of his UK tour tonight, he also breaks off the interview to call a friend about dinner. Doubtful that he’ll make their rendezvous, the singer apologises to his pal, and because this is hardly helping, I apologise to Adams. It’s OK, he says, thumping violently on a pack of 200 American cigarettes, “ I rattle on. Now, where were we?” Well, we were trying to make sense of a year which — even by Adams’s standards — has been productive. It’s always impressive when artists deliver a couple of great albums within months of each other — Elvis Costello managed it in 1986; Radiohead did it in nine months between 2000 and 2001. At the end of 2004 however, Ryan Adams declared that in the next 12 months he would deliver three separate albums: a lachrymose double called Cold Roses, a dewy country-rock set called Jacksonville City Nights, and perhaps most alarmingly, 29 — a song-cycle loosely based on his own suicide. When an artist known for his mood swings makes a promise like that, any excitement is tempered by concern for his welfare.
When 29 slipped out almost unnoticed amid all the pre-Christmas releases, it turned out that our concerns weren’t entirely unfounded. Its monochrome shadow-world seemed emblematic of a huge psychic comedown. “I’d always secretly thought that I’d just probably commit suicide before I was 30,” explains Adams plainly. When I ask why, he momentarily shoots back a stare that suggests it should be obvious. “I was depressed. And I was, like, obsessed with . . . hurting myself.”
He says he was finally made aware of his self-destructive tendencies after the accident at the end of his Liverpool show two years ago, when he fell off the stage and snapped his arm at the wrist. “It was the final song of the encore,” he remembers. “I knew it was broken. It was just hanging off, but I finished the last four lines and got rushed off to the emergency room.”
After the accident he returned to his flat in New York’s West Village and bought a dog — “a simple thing,” he says, “but one which helped save my life because it helped me to see myself from a different perspective.”
Enlisting for a course of Freudian psychoanalysis had a similar effect. Ironically, for a singer whose pill-chomping had become legendary, he says he chose psychoanalysis “because (a psychiatrist) would just prescribe you a bunch of mood stabilisers. Here though, you get to know why you’re reacting to things.”
Lest we imagine that 29 was merely an album of depressing songs, he explains how analysis helped to bring these stories into the world. He talks about the protagonist in the exquisitely yearning Carolina Rain, who never got to tell the object of his affections how he loved her before his life ended. He talks about a dead friend whose letter to him inadvertently gave him the most affecting lines on the heartbreaking Strawberry Wine: “It’s getting winter/ And if you want any flowers/ You gotta get your seeds in.”
And he talks about the driving roadhouse blues of the title track, on which lemming-words spill out to describe “a poor little kid in the lungs of New York/ Just like the motherless son of a bitch/ Loaded on ephedrine looking for downers and coke.” It’s a description that seems to tally with Adams’s mid-twenties, shortly after his old band Whiskeytown disbanded and he moved to New York from North Carolina. “Well, it’s a literal song about drinking and doing heroin and doing coke and getting f***** up and driving a car without a licence,” he confirms, before adding rather sweetly:
“Not drunk, though. I never drove drunk.”
The key though, he continues, is that all the characters in the songs are dead. According to the Freudian interpretation, all are manifestations of his own personality. “These are all their thoughts, seconds after a suicide, when your neural systems start shutting down. That’s why on the final song the stories have dwindled and now it’s full participation in whatever comes next . . . you get the actual interaction with Elijah and Gabriel.”
Adams says he realised how completely he’d managed to “channel” the characters on the album only when he saw the goosebumps on the arm of his producer, Ethan Johns. Reaching 30 has allowed him to lay his youth to rest, he says, and realise that “you (should) store moments of transcendental happiness and hold them close, so they can get you through when times are f*****.”
Some things haven’t changed however. The puppyish provocateur adored by Elton John and associated with a string of actresses such as Winona Ryder, Parker Posey and Minnie Driver, the bon-viveur of the Americana movement, he still likes a tipple on stage, he still swears like both Gallaghers put together and actresses still fancy him. That said, he won’t be drawn on rumours of a liaison with Lindsay Lohan. “I don’t know if I’m single at the moment,” he says.
If Adams has made the most extraordinary album of his life, it wasn’t appreciated by critical reaction in his own country. The All Music Guide concluded: “It’s the first time Adams has sounded completely worn out.” Rolling Stone declared: “Someone get this man an editor.” Elsewhere, the consensus seemed to be that Adams was a stylistic fly-by-night.
As to his diverse influences, he tells a story about the first three records he owned, at the age of 13. A friend of his older brother found a discarded box of records from which the two siblings were welcome to choose. After the brother, a heavy metal fan, made his selections, the young Ryan made off with records by the Smiths as well as the US punk combos Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys. “I remember skateboarding home on the way back, and (the Smiths’) Hatful of Hollow fell from its sleeve and the vinyl chipped on the opening tracks. So I never got to hear William, it was Really Nothing.” That’s the key, he says, along with his parents’ vast collection of country music.
“(Critics) think I’m being disingenuous and I can understand why it’s confusing. Most people like things to be condensed and commodified.”
Perhaps the problem lies with his sheer output. When an artist seems to deliver solo albums as effortlessly as hens lay eggs, it’s inevitable that people might think they don’t mean as much to their creator as, say, Coldplay’s albums mean to them. Adams looks saddened. “That’s so crazy, because it means everything to me. I can’t stop myself.”
It just isn’t the modern way of doing things, I suggest. There’s less risk in selling one album by an established artist every three years. “But I really do just dick around with a guitar and come up with a bunch of songs! That’s just what I do!” He glances at the clock. He’s missed yoga and the chances of him making that dinner date are bleak. The good news is that he’s now free to dick around on his guitar for as long as he likes.
Ryan Adams’s tour starts tonight at Nottingham Royal Concert Hall; Sat 18, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall; Mon 20, Manchester Bridgewater Hall; Fri 24, London Apollo Victoria
Here's a concert review from a few nights ago:
Tonight I watched one of the finest songwriters of his generation, possibly even the finest, destroy himself on stage with the kind of glee reserved for only someone either insane or stoned on drugs and drink. If he was indeed sane, sober and straight then I'm even more puzzled by his suicidal attempts to derail his own career.
When my frind left at the interval that was the single shrewdist move he's made in years.
The second half was possibly the most excrutiating 70 minutes of live music I've seen in a decade. Possibly ever.
Whilst the first set contained some farting about it was by and large entertaining farting about between some superb renditions of songs old and new.
For the second set he started farting around from the second he came out and never even tried to get it back on track. I would have left but it was like watching a car crash in slow motion. You had to keep watching to see where it was finally going to stop. The songs took second place to all this banter and even the better versions were often cut short or totally obliterated by whatever distraction his brain latched onto next.
He thought this was all one great laugh and was having a great time. What is probably equally telling is that a large percentage of the audience thought this was all very entertaining too and laughed all night at the antics of this desperate troubled clown. Either they find this behaviour endearing or they care little for what this man is doing to himself and in turn them.
He needs help not further encouragement from his audiences at present. Especially from those of us like me who are genuine fans and have been with him from the beginning over 10 years ago.
The numbers leaving throughout the second half were too numerous to keep tabs on.
He made mention tonight that his aim is to reduce the numbers of people coming to see him to the point where so few turn out to see him that he no longer needs to tour. Whilst this was said in a jocular fashion, it is with a heavy heart that I tonight will comply with his request and reduce his future concert tickets sales by one as far as I am concerned. At least until there are signs that he has rediscovered his muse.
At present, unless someone sorts him out and soon he is simply another Gram Parsons waiting to happen.
don't get me wrong, it grabbed my attention and anytime i can hear a musician playing actual music on the radio i'm thrilled. i just couldn't get over it in my mind the references i heard. but my brother said to check him out as well so i'm looking forward to diving into the deep end with mr adams.
everytime i have to take a crap i sing EVACUATION!!!
EVACUATION!!
"i'll let you be in my dream if i can be in your dream." -b.dylan
I hear you, wasn't slammin' you or anything. I had the same attitude as you and, like many great artists, it suddenly clicked for me.
StoneG82, that's a great 29 article. It's absolutely one of my favorites as of now. Every song is just so sad and beautiful. I can't believe the amount of emotion put into the songs. It sounds like he wants to live though and as long as that's there...
As for his live performances, I'm too new of a fan to have seem him yet, but it sounds like he just doesn't give a shit, which is fine by me. I enjoy that quite a bit actually (I AM a dyed-in-the-wool Neil Young fan). I buy concert tickets because I enjoy watching my favorite artists perform and I don't have any sense of entitlement with that. If I don't enjoy it I won't see him/her/them again but I certainly don't think to complain or anything, which is what I see a lot of over on the Ryan boards.
I saw Ryan Adams last May. He was quite self destructive on stage, complaining about the audience and stopping songs because of noise from the bar. I loved every minute of it though. He is great live, despite what everyone says. Even if he is having an off night, it's still entertaining.
oh and your'e right, all those people on Ryan boards do is bitch and complain.
29 has really grown on me. I think that record is just a beautiful mess.