Country: US
Artist: Male solo artist
Career: solo debut
Language: English
Genre: Singer-songwriter
For my next trick I might do something ambitious and listen to all of Ryan Adams’s records.
I had this record at the time, but when Adams turned out to be a self-destructive egghead (around 2001 or so – ‘Gold’ was truly a record like a damp soufflé), I felt like I’d been had and sold it. Now I feel like I’ve been had cause I could’ve been enjoying this great record all along. Cause it comes from the place where great records come from: when a talented musician suddenly hits the motherlode writing songs, finds the right band to play them and manages to record a great sounding record out of them. In this case, those three conditions were all met, and no personal feelings should detract from that.
He’s got the songs, they just roll over each other on this album, one after another like an endless supply of genre exercises, playful ditties, heartbreaking ballads, it feels like it’s never going to end. He’s got the band: I mean, you’ve got to hand it to Gillian Welch, David Rawlings and Ethan Johns – they’ve got all the right moves, take on all the shades that the songs require and stay out of the way when the songs require nothing. And they made a great sounding record out of it. All the instruments sound really nice, and that’s no mean feat. I had listener friends who got turned off by how high the vocals are in the mix, but I think it’s just right. And the sequencing is excellent – like I said, the songs are just rolling by, one after another and when he hits on a really excellent one, say the reverie of ‘Amy’, or the almost mythical feeling of home in ‘Oh my sweet Carolina’, the 5am pensiveness of ‘Sweet lil gal’, it gets me, it really does. This record kicked Americana into a new gear at the beginning of the century, for better and worse. That’s the influence these kind of powerful records always have.
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