Prolific songwriter’s heart still breaking (good news for us, anyway)
It’s like Ryan Adams tries to piss off his fans. In the seven years since the slow-burning twang of his first solo album, Heartbreaker, he’s become a musical shape-shifter, seemingly dipping into his record collection and saying, “Yeah, I’m going to try to sound like The Smiths” (Love is Hell) “…or maybe The Grateful Dead” (Cold Roses) “…nah, The Replacements” (Rock N Roll). But it also seems like the fans have been trying to piss off Ryan Adams, ever demanding (“enough with the bratty rockstar schtick!”) that he return to his alt.country roots. Save for 2005’s Jacksonville City Nights, he hasn’t been very obliging.
But he has kept very busy—much too busy, some say, what with Adams spewing songs and records as if he’s got musical Tourette’s. Last year was the first in this decade that he didn’t release an album (or three), though one only has to take a look at his website—full of dozens of absurdist rap songs and novelty tracks like “Space is Big (Whatever)” and “I’m Going to Kill Myself in the Face”—to realize that the man never ever stops recording, a phenomenon that results in more instances of beautiful music than any one person should have a right to.
His latest, Easy Tiger, contains more than a few moments like this. Tighter and shorter than almost anything he’s recorded yet (most of the 13 tracks clock in at around three minutes or less), Easy Tiger finds Adams and backing band The Cardinals in near-top form, combining the best of the catchy, noodling guitar licks from Cold Roses with the country-fried plucking of Jacksonville City Nights. While it’s hard to predict what he will sound like from album to album, there’s no escaping the dark-of-night tenor of his lyrics. Ryan Adams is in the business of making heartache sound transcendent.
Whether lamenting a one-sided love affair in “Everybody Knows” (“You and I together, but only one of us in love”) or acknowledging the end of another on “The Sun Also Sets” (“I had a feeling we were fading out / I didn’t know that people faded out so fast”), Adams, as always, scores his most direct hits when singing about loss (of love, of youth, of life). It’s this focused dourness that makes a track like “Halloweenhead,”—the album’s only straight rocker—seem out of place despite it’s catchy refrain, “I got a bad idea again, I got a Halloween head.”
Yet too much of the old, downbeat Adams can take a song over the line from pleasantly melancholy to just plain old depressing, as on the album’s one true dud, “Off Broadway.” Over plinking guitars, Adams sings wispily about being thrown into confusion after seeing an old flame speed by him on a New York City avenue. When it’s not the banal street observations (“Rats scurry from the gutter to their holes / All these people and they’re trying to get home”), it’s the song’s repetitiveness (the refrain “I don’t know where that is anymore / Used to be off Broadway” invoked over and over and over again) that sinks the tune. It’s as if the things that make Adams one of this decade’s strongest singer/songwriters—his naturalistic narrative style and resigned, raw-voiced tales of romantic woe—can be his greatest undoing when one or two elements are slightly off. But to see how good it can be when he gets things right, one only needs to hear “These Girls,” where Adams laments his weakness in the face of “late night girls” before realizing that they’re “better off in my head.” It’s possibly the wisest song he’s ever written about women and he’s written plenty.
So all you pissed-off Ryan Adams fans, get happy, because your man’s sad again. And by the time he reminds us “Tomorrow’s on its way and there’s always new songs to sing” on the simple, almost Appalachian country jam “Pearls on a String,” you’ll feel inclined to view the lyric as a treat and not a threat.