Albums Revisited: Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker

Ryan Adams -Heartbreaker

Lost Highway Records, 2000

I've been on the biggest Ryan Adams kick this past week: playing old favorites, rediscovering albums I always left underrated, digging deeper into his catalog towards the stuff I never gave a fair chance to, and scouring the internet for all the odd b-sides, sessions and unreleased albums that he's recorded over the years. This kind of thing often happens after I see a band live for the first time, but with Adams, it's like I'm tackling the work of 3 or 4 artists at once. This guy has so many different sides and sounds, and like I said in my live review, has got to be the most prolific singer/songwriter of the past decade or two. He's like Dylan back in his glory days, or Springsteen around the Darkness/River period, leaving a plethora of songs unreleased for decades at a time.

I've never spent as much time with the Whiskeytown material as I should. Ryan's solo career is such a vast undertaking in and of itself that I've never delved very far beyond that. Many music critics (Pitchfork being the most obvious), would argue that Ryan never made a worthwhile album after his solo debut, the sparse, Nebraska-esque Heartbreaker. Interestingly, this record is far from my favorite thing that Adams has done, but I can certainly understand (and agree with) the praise. Like all Ryan Adams records, I think there are a handful of throwaways, and they're positioned about Heartbreaker's in such a way that I've never really been able to get into it as a whole. That said, when the record gets things right, it gets them very right. The proper opener, "To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)," is pretty much the closest anyone has gotten to replicating the Highway 61 era Dylan sound, and it's really no surprise the song became such a soundtrack staple in the years following the release (high class art films from Old School to Accepted used the song at key moments).

Beyond that one song, I've never felt that Adams' veered too much into Dylan territory on this record. The loud, electric opening gives way to an album full of thoughtful, broken-hearted, stark acoustic songs, and they showcase Adams at his best, if not musically, then at very least lyrically. No example is better than the gorgeously fragile "Oh My Sweet Carolina," where he duets with Emmylou Harris, herself an alt-country legend, over the greatest verses he's ever written. Seriously, who else was writing lines like these in the year 2000? Lines like: "I was spending money like the way it likes to rain," or "I ain't never been to Vegas, but I gambled up my life," or "The sunset's just my lightbulb burning out." Harris's vocals float through the background, combining with the lyrics to make a song that is both thoroughly haunting and indescribably beautiful. I have a theory that Conor Oberst was trying to recreate this song when he wrote "Landlocked Blues" (from the 2005 Bright Eyes album I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning), which also featured an artist at the top of his game, lyrically, and also featured Harris on back-up vocals. In a big way, Wide Awake works as a companion to this album, so maybe that's why I've always been so drawn to both of them at similar times in my life. And both records are ones that I was unsure about on my first listen.

Despite the fact that Heartbreaker has always felt a tad uneven and incorrectly sequenced to me, the number of truly great songs here cannot be ignored. Most of the record is understated, low-key acoustic guitar songs. It's always amazed me how broken and bare Ryan's voice sounds on songs like "Call Me On Your Way Back Home" or "In My Time of Need," but then he can turn around and deliver something like "Be My Winding Wheel," which is really just a perfect pop song in acoustic/alt-country dress, or "Come Pick Me Up," which is pretty much the ultimate break-up anthem. And that a record that starts with such a lively rock song ends with something like "Sweet Lil Gal" is mindblowing to me. "In the field where the plane went down..." Ryan repeats over and over again throughout that song, his hushed vocals and a distant piano laid bare over the powerful imagery. Every time I listen, that song just makes me want to press play all over again

Short Takes/Albums Revisited: Ryan Bingham - Mescalito

Ryan Bingham - Mescalito

Lost Highway Records, 2007

 

The past few years, spurred on by my interest in the music of Ryan Adams and Will Hoge and by the increasing level of influence the genre seems to have on Butch Walker's recent music, have seen me really getting into alt-country. Indeed, rootsy-rock and folk music dominated my best-of list this year, and the aforementioned artists continue to be some of my favorites making music today. Ryan Bingham fits right in with Hoge, especially. He had a break-out year in 2010, when he won the Best Original Song Oscar for "The Weary Kind," a fantastic tune he contributed to the soundtrack of the Jeff Bridges Best Actor vehicle Crazy Heart. That song pretty much gave the film it's heartbeat, and I made sure to check out Bingham immediately after seeing the film.

His 2010 full length, entitled Junky Star and made with a group of musicians he called the Dead Horses, actually closed out with "The Weary Kind" as a bonus track. It was a solid set of songs that made it into my honorable mentions and just missed my top 20 or so last year. Similarly, Roadhouse Sun, his more rock-oriented sophomore record from the year before, was something I liked but never loved. The first one I listened to, though, was his solo debut from 2007, called Mescalito, and revisiting the album yesterday (during the lengthy process of wrapping Christmas presents), reminded me of what a terrific record it was, and what a great songwriter this guy can be. Bingham has one of the most distinctive voices out there, a whiskey-drenched growl that lands somewhere between Will Hoge and Tom Waits, and on this record, he uses it to perfect effect. You can hear the nuances and subtleties of the stories he tells in that voice, and while it's not technically an amazing instrument, it's so distinctive and so perfectly suited to these songs that I can't imagine anyone else singing them.

The two subsequent records saw a more fleshed out, full-band approach to Bingham's sound, but he has some truly terrific moments here, as a lone-troubadour with his acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a notebook full of songs and stories. There are still plenty of full-band traces though, like on the fantastic, absorbing opener, "Southside of Heaven," where percussion and bass keep the song driving, and electric and steel guitar flourishes (and even a bit of mandolin and banjo) turn it into a five-star opener. "Bread and Water" gives Bingham and co. the chance for a honky-tonk breakdown, and "Hard Times" is a more rock-driven number that wouldn't have been out of place on this record's follow up. Meanwhile, the band is mostly dismissed to let Bingham do his thing on songs like "Don't Wait For Me," "Ever Wonder Why" and "Sunrise," which opens with an instantly nostalgic duet between an acoustic guitar and a fiddle. But Bingham saves the best for last in the form of the gorgeous "For What It's Worth," a summer-night campfire song if there ever was one, where Bingham pushes his voice to the limit. It's a song so good that it's often led me to overlook much of the record that preceeds it, which is shame, because there are a lot of terrific things going on here. Perhaps it's time to revisit the rest of Bingham's catalog as well.