Music Collection #7: Ryan Adams, finale

Artist: Ryan Adams and The Cardinals
Album: Cold Roses; Jacksonville City Nights; 29
Favorite Song: If I Am A Stranger; The End; Strawberry Wine
Origin: Borders, downtown Milwaukee; ditto; and a birthday gift

2005 was a banner year for Ryan Adams. Or, at the very least, a marathon year - releasing three albums within the span of 8 months or so, the first of them a double album. At first I was going to write separate posts for all of these albums, but I decided that it made more sense to combine them, even though the album don't hang together as a trio. Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights are, in a way, companion pieces. Each stands alone, but they also complement each other. Really, they probably could have been released (with a few edits) as a single long double album - dump a couple of the slower tracks from Roses and some of the more generic songs from Jacksonville, shift a few others from the former to the latter, and voila! Which isn't to say that Adams should have done that, just that he could have (if I had more time and I was more awake, I'd throw together my hypothetical double-album setlist).

These two albums mark Adams' return to more country-influenced rock, but with Cold Roses having a more alt-country, bluegrass feel, and Jacksonville City Nights the more honky-tonk, straight-up country feel.
Cold Roses strength lies, then, in the more up-tempo rockers like If I Am A Stranger, Beautiful Sorta, and Let It Ride. All three are classic Adams - noise and bluster paired with melancholy, self-pitying lyrics. Jacksonville's strongest tracks - The End, A Kiss Before I Go, The Hardest Part, The Peaceful Valley - by contrast, have a more atmospherically country feel to them in place of the bluster. The lyrics tend more towards classic country themes, too - small towns, lost loves, death.

What really makes both of these albums work, though, is Adams' new backing band, The Cardinals. Though he plays guitar and piano in addition to singing, Adams has always relied on other musicians on his albums. But those musicians change from album to album, track to track. Here, he's got the same four-piece band backing him on every track (with a couple guest appearances by Rachael Yamagata and Norah Jones), which provides a consistency in both quality and overall sound. I have to admit that I was skeptical at first of the idea of Adams bringing in a regular band - partly because of the personnel-changing chaos that was Whiskeytown, partly because of the fear of a band diluting his music, and partly for fear of the pretense that comes with being ______ ______ and the _______s!


Finally, you'll note that I haven't said a word yet about 29. There's a reason for that - it's not very good. A couple of the tracks could have maybe fit on another album, but as a whole, it is simply too understated, too quiet (the volume is turned to -11), too pretentious (lots of strings), and too self-indulgent (it's a concept album about his twenties, for Christ's sake). Plus, it contains the single worst Ryan Adams track ever put to record - the spaghetti-western outtake The Sadness, which is just too awful to accurately describe.

So, that ends my foray into Ryan Adams. Having one of my favorite artists right at the beginning of this music project has really, I think, thrown off the feel of the project - most posts after this will cover multiple albums, and will be less like album reviews and more like some random thoughts on the albums strung together. But, given that I'm only doing this once, I couldn't after-all shortchange some of my favorite albums.