Music Collection #4: Ryan Adams, Demolition

Artist: Ryan Adams
Album: Demolition
Favorite Song: Dear Chicago
Origin: Amoeba, San Francisco

Do you ever get the feeling that the randomizer is reading your mind? Yeah, me neither. But it totally did today. I was thinking what to say about this album, a collection of unreleased songs (demos, if you will - get it? Demolition?), and the randomizer went and played all three of my favorite tracks - Dear Chicago, Chin Up, Cheer Up, and Cry on Demand.

When I first bought this album, it was one of those "hey, neat!" moments that you rarely have, where you first hear of an album by seeing it on the rack in the store. With all of the music press nowadays, that's pretty rare. So I bought it and listened a few times. Like most collection of unreleased songs, it doesn't really hold together as an album, and there are plenty of songs that make it real clear why they didn't make it onto an album. (Nuclear, Starting to Hurt, and Gimme a Sign, for instance, all sound like rejects from Rock N Roll, an album that isn't good enough to have rejects.) But over time, I would find myself singing some song in my head, and I would dig around for a bit before I realized that it came from this record. Chin Up, Cheer Up and She Wants to Play Hearts (another good song) were like this - sorta sneaking up on me over time.

The best track on the album, though, is Dear Chicago, which is one of those rare cases for me where the track that started as my favorite has remained so. It's produced by Adams himself, I see from the liner notes, and sounds like something that would have fit both sonically and thematically on Love is Hell, which he co-produced (same holds for the other two Adams-produced tracks). The music is simple and haunting, and the lyrics are pretty direct, ending with one of my favorite break-up lines ever, sung in a pretty and resigned voice "I think I'm falling out of love ... with you." A perfect 2-minute song of heartbreak. This is the sort of song that makes an odds and ends collection worth having for real fans, and makes you say "How the hell did this not end up on an album?"