Tag: Ryan Adams

Quoted

Same

“We’re the same! We’re F-to-A-minor!”

— Ryan Adams
Short Cuts

Steven Hyden Interviews Ryan Adams for Grantland, Talks ‘1989’

If it isn’t obvious, I’m just a bit excited about the Ryan Adams cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I’ll try to make this the last post about it (for now), but Steven Hyden’s interview with Adams for Grantland is just too good to not post about it. The entire interview is great, seriously, just go read it. But here are my favorite bits.

Hyden doesn’t waste any time jumping right in, quickly asking Adams how the album came to be. I love the response:

The quick and easy way to describe how it came to be is, I basically was on the road for a year and three months, and when you get off the road, your body isn’t ready to let go of the time of night when you’re going to get ready to start playing. So at 8 p.m. every night, for three weeks to a month, your adrenaline will start firing and your body is going, Oh shit, I’m going to play in an hour. Then nine to eleven, you’re in the weird space-time continuum of where you’re not onstage, but you feel like you are.

Over the Christmas holiday I had a three-week break, and that’s when I originally started to track 1989. But I was tracking on a four-track cassette recorder. It was like, “Yeah, cool, I’m going to cover it like Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.” Then the cassette tape was eaten by the machine, which was unbelievable — after a week of setup, too. I didn’t get discouraged, but in my mind, I went, Well, this is not meant to be in the style; I’ll do it later. I’ll make it an after-tour, fun project.”

Next, Hyden deftly weaves a question by contrasting Adams’ prolific songwriting career with his growing notoriety (as he appears to some) as a cover artist:

There’s an interesting paradox to your career, which is that you’re known as a really prolific songwriter, and yet some of your most popular songs are covers. Your version of Oasis’s “Wonderwall” is easily your most streamed track on Spotify, and 1989 is poised to become one of your most successful albums. How do you feel about that?

Well, I’m not surprised that they’re more popular because they’re already more popular, so that makes sense. But I usually don’t think to cover a song unless it’s something that really moves me or there’s something for me to offer the song. I also cover Greg Sage, who was in the Wipers. My favorite band from New Zealand, the Verlaines, I’ve covered them. Or I’ll cover Natalie Prass. Or Black Sabbath.

“Wonderwall” always belonged on Love Is Hell, and it always belonged in that style, because it said something in the middle of that record that needed to be said, and it actually needed to be said in that context because that record was about a time that I spent between New York and London, and it was about losing someone that I loved very much and then falling in love with someone else while I was on a lot of drugs. [I was] taking pills and drinking and stuff, and sort of staying in this daydream to nullify a huge amount of psychological pain associated with losing someone that passed away.

The interview also offers more insight into how Adams approaches his craft, his appreciation for Taylor Swift’s music, and the level of Swift’s involvement and prior knowledge of the project (beyond her fangirl tweets).

Snap

Ryan Adams Releases ‘1989’, Tech Press Rejoices

When Ryan Adams revealed via Twitter a month or so ago that he was working on covering the entirety of Taylor Swift’s 1989, I don’t think I was alone in rejoicing; nor was I likely the only one who feared the project would never see the light of public day. It turns out, our fears were unfounded. With a bit more fanfare than a typical Adams release, the Ryan Adams reinterpretation of Swift’s 2014 chart topper made its way out into the wild.

Much to my surprise, the tech press was all over the news. Here are bits of the reports that I didn’t expect to see coming across my tech RSS and Twitter feeds:

First, James Vincent over on The Verge:

Adams’ reimagining of 1989 has already generated significant buzz thanks in no small part to Swift’s engagement with the project. Last week, she called news of the cover album “surreal and dreamlike” (adjectives that can also be applied to the listening experience), and this morning took to Twitter to retweet praise for the project, including judgments such as “if you need me, I’ll be listening to this on repeat for the rest of my life,” and “SCREAMING CRYING PERFECT STORMS.” It’s fair to say then that the reception, so far, seems pretty good.

Next, Wired graces us with a back and forth between K.M. McFarland and Jordan Crucchiola in Two Superfans Break Down Ryan Adams 1989 Cover Album. Here’s K.M. McFarland aptly drawing out the brilliance of Swift’s original work by way of its role as Adams’ muse:

K.M. McFarland: Turning this into a solo piano ballad reveals the inadvertent work Adams accomplishes with his full-album covers project. In general, Taylor Swift—like other pop artists with younger fanbases—gets pigeonholed as trivial and unworthy of critical analysis. But Adams’ covers are nothing if not wholly serious, proving that the underlying foundation of Swift’s songs merit this kind of meticulous attention. “This Love” is mournful but unspectacular in Adams’ hands, but it highlights the larger merits of this endeavor.

And finally, from probably the most unexpected corner of my tech world, Jason Snell writing for his Six Colors blog:

Covering an entire album is a pretty bold gesture, and doing it while the previous album is still in the public consciousness is even bolder. Swift’s original is very much modern pop infused with an ’80s pop sensibility, which—as an ’80s pop music fan—I love. Adams’ choices in reinterpreting the songs are fascinating—I hear Springsteen, Neil Young, even Chris Isaak at one point.

It’s unlikely I’ll ever recover enough of my overly anxious reactions for a full post or review, but right now my early favorites are ‘Out of the Woods’, ‘Clean’, ‘Blank Space’, and ‘All You Had To Do Was Stay’.

Short Cuts

15 Years Ago: Ryan Adams Releases ‘Heartbreaker’ ↬

Adams’ ambivalent relationship with his home state is captured beautifully in “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” featuring guest turns from Emmylou Harris and Pat Sansone from Wilco, but it’s more than that. The song captures the restless nature of young adulthood, when the desire to roam and the pull of deep roots battle for supremacy. “I was trying to find me something / But I wasn’t sure just what / Man I ended up with pockets full of dust,” he sings. We’ve all been there, and even if we haven’t Miss Emmylou’s harmonies are enough to make us feel like we have been.

Ambivalent, indeed.

O&F
Audible

Ryan Adams Covers 1989

I see every tweet about Natalie Prass, pinball machines, and cats, but somehow I missed the tweets that Ryan Adams is recording/covering every track from Taylor Swift’s 1989. Thankfully, Paste Magazine came to my rescue by breaking the news in their daily newsletter.

Swift, being the social juggernaut that she is, caught the news and seems excited. Stuff like this is exactly why every artist should have their own record label – or, at the very least, the freedom to do these types of things. If Adams doesn’t end up releasing this in some way I am going to be most disappointed.

  1. Tweasing = tweeting + teasing.  ↩

Quoted

Love Everything

“There is nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything. Negative people find their walls. So never apologize for your enthusiasm. Never. Ever. Never.”

— Ryan Adams
Short Cuts

Melody and Words

Over on Grantland, Steven Hyden explores the possibilities of the unexplored Ryan Adams and, in the process, exquisitely sums up the talent that is Ryan Adams:

On the one hand, it confirms his status as the most talented singer-songwriter of his generation. When it comes to putting melody and words together into appealing, melodic, and heart-rending packages, nobody does it with more apparent ease.

Adams’ career arc hasn’t been quite what it seems a lot of people expected, but I think the only people who are suffering from that are the ones with the outsized expectations.

Audible

Sit and Listen

DR: Ryan Adams released his umpteenth album, Ryan Adams, last week and JB and I felt like it was a perfect time to finally throw together our all-time top ten Ryan Adams song list. We’ve sort of collaborated on lists before, but never the same list, so this is going to be interesting. We did a little pre-work, each of us nominating songs to be considered. The point of that exercise was basically to help me brush up on the catalog – I’m not as well versed in anything after Love is Hell, which means depending on how this list shapes up, I might not even be remotely qualified to be having this conversation. Naturally, this means I’m going to lean heavily toward the Whiskeytown / Heartbreaker / Gold eras, while JB will help balance us out with the later stuff. This should be fun. Without further ado, let’s get started. I planned to kick things off with number ten, but I really need JB to set the tone for this list, otherwise it’s going to get out of hand really quick.

JB: Well, I truly intend to set the tone, but not in the way you think. Instead of giving you number 10, I am going to give you a couple that just missed the cut for me. Now keep in mind, with this type of back and forth we may not get everything out of our top 10, but it should be a little more representative and even involve a bit of strategery. The most difficult cut for me came in the form of Adams’ disarming cover of Oasis’ classic ‘Wonderwall’. Including this track may have been a form of cheating, but in this case it would have been worth it. Adams does so well to change the tone and highlight the amazing range in his vocal talent. This was a tough cut for me. Also missing the cut for me: ‘Two’, ‘Born Into a Light’, ‘Faithless Street’, and ‘Firecracker’. I never thought ‘Firecracker’ would miss the cut, but that should just whet your appetite for what’s to come.

DB: Not exactly what I was going for, but you did at least set the tone, so I’ll take it. I’m with you, ‘Firecracker’ was just outside the cut for me, but one of your other cuts is in my Top 10 so we’ll just have to see how this shapes up. Okay, let’s get this thing started.

10. ‘Nuclear’, Demolition
Did any of the critics actually like Demolition? I loved it, but it also came just as my Ryan Adams fandomonium was hitting its stride. Adams himself wasn’t a fan, though it had more to do with how the album was put together than the tracks themselves. Other personal faves include ‘Cry on Demand’ and ‘Desire’, and one more that I hope appears later in this list (that is, if I didn’t inadvertently eliminate it from the list with this pick.)

9. ‘Let it Ride’, Cold Roses (Disc 2)
His debut effort with the band the Cardinals. The band was formed informally in 2001 with JP Bowersock who he met through his neighbor. This double album is beyond solid and really brings Adams back to his alt-country roots, which I love as you will quickly be able to deduce from my contributions to this list. I fear this selection will leave one of my Whiskeytown favorites out in the cold, but that is the nature of this type of exchange so I will ‘Let it Ride’. In the end Cold Roses is too good an album to not have a selection on this list.

8. ‘Excuse me While I Break My Own Heart’, Strangers Almanac
Our first and unapologetically not our last Whiskeytown era track. This track somehow eluded my running list of Adams favorites over the years. It re-entered my consciousness while researching for this list and I just can’t believe I’ve been missing it all these years. Adams draws me in with a higher percentage of his moody, slower stuff, but I love this bit of uptempo goodness from him (ahem, them).

7. ‘When Stars go Blue’, Gold
This is the toughest call of them all in this format. It is safely in my Top 10, but I am afraid this is going to bump out some I had higher on my list. However, I think it makes sense on this list for many reasons. It is without a doubt his most commercially successful song, even though that success does not involve him on vocals, see Bono, Tim McGraw or Haley. I think this song is probably the best representation of Adams as a songwriter with its country pop sound. It also speaks to his greatness as a songwriter that he could write something that has been adapted so wonderfully by a disparate group of artists.

6. ‘Two’, Easy Tiger
Serendipitously, this song lands exactly where I wanted it, though it takes some of the luster off the shine knowing it was cut from your final ten. I went back and forth between putting this song and ‘Hallelujah’ from Demolition here, but this is clearly too high of a spot for ‘Hallelujah’ (which really belongs at 10 in a tie with ‘Nuclear’). The thing about ‘Two’ and the reason I had to put it here is that it’s my favorite song of anything Adams has released since Rock ‘n Roll. That alone doesn’t make it a top ten lock – it’s also one of the catchiest hooks, both in lyrics and melody, that Adams has produced in his prolific career. That makes it the kind of song that stays with you long after a listen and pops up from time to time in your mind whether you’ve heard it recently or not.

5. ‘To Be Young (is to be sad)’, Heartbreaker
The first entry (though I am sure not the last) from Adams’ debut solo effort. Written after a bad break up (ironically spelling the end of Whiskeytown), the album contains the highs and lows of someone dealing with heartbreak. ‘To be Young …’ is probably the highpoint tonally and my favorite up-tempo Adams song. The guitar riffs (and copious quantities of drugs) on this song carry you away and for that brief 3 minutes make you forget whats her name (I like to think it’s Parker Posey).

4. ‘Don’t Be Sad’, Pneumonia (Whiskeytown)
I struggled a lot with this pick. I originally had a second Gold track slotted for this spot, but weighing your feelings of ‘Don’t Be Sad’ gave me pause and forced me to reconsider. Gold is probably, from top to bottom, Adams’ most impressive work, but it doesn’t have the single that stands above anything that will make this top five. ‘Don’t Be Sad’ is a classic Adams fast moving ballad; a simple song with relatively few lyrics. But the depth contained in those few lyrics gets a lot of mileage out of the less than three and a half minute runtime.

3. ‘Hallelujah’, Demolition
Not sure I would have ever guessed two tracks from the jam session that became Demolition would make it on this list, but ‘Hallelujah’ is the type of Ryan Adams track I love the most, with its folky sound and country twang. It may not be how Adams views himself, but I think it is him at his best in part because it draws so strongly from his roots as a boy from eastern North Carolina (roots we share in common). As with a lot of his music, the lyrics center on who he is and who he wants to be, and that is something to which we all can relate. All in all, this is just a masterclass and while it is not my #1, at this point, we are splitting hairs.

2. ‘Oh My Sweet Carolina’, Heartbreaker
Ryan Adams. North Carolina. His home state. My home state. Need I say more? I’m a homer in the worst way and despite my best efforts at denial I can’t escape it. Ignoring that, I love this song and its beautiful simplicity. Earlier this year, I was reminded just how subtly powerful Adams’ vocals are when I watched a video of him performing a cover of ‘Neutron Dance’ at Code Conference. When I listen to ‘Carolina’ carefully enough, it amazes me how much you can get a similar sense of that power in such a quiet song. ‘Carolina’ is the ultimate achievement in songwriting, composition, and performance and belongs in the conversation of Adams masterpieces.

1. ‘Sit and Listen to the Rain’, Pneumonia (Whiskeytown)
JB: It was always going to be this song. In reality, this was a competition for second and while our personal list varied quite dramatically in some cases, this is the one we both agreed on. As I said earlier, Ryan Adams struggles with who he is, where he is from and what all that means. He is the boy who grew up in Jacksonville, NC, but he is also the man who burned the midnight oil in New York City, and the man who turned over a new leaf in Los Angeles. He has always longed to be somewhere else and be someone else, as he rifs, “Sit around, dream away the place I’m from.” It seems ironic that this journey has brought us home. The song that longs for the future, but was written at home. As you read this list and enjoy the sounds, it’s home that makes us who we are and shapes our future. It is all these places that makes Ryan Adams who he is, and while he has certainly burned bright I am just thankful he isn’t done writing his ‘Wonderwall’.

DR: Well said, JB. My appreciation for the song is probably a little more superficial, but no less significant. When I first heard ‘Sit and Listen to the Rain’ I knew immediately it had a permanent place in my all-time rotation. ‘Sit and Listen …’ is my go to song when I want to let my mind wander off and ponder; when I want to remember; when I want to dream. The best part for me through the years, whether real or imagined, is having this vision of Ryan Adams sitting on a porch somewhere in North Carolina writing this song. And so, sometimes when it rains, I’ll walk out to our front porch, sit, listen and wonder if that’s what he was feeling.

Photo Credit: Laura Musselman (via Flickr)

Quoted

Ride

“Tennessee’s a brother to my sister Carolina where they’re gonna bury me.”

— Ryan Adams, ‘Let it Ride’