Ryan Adams hits a soft spot on Ashes & Fire
By: MATT ASHARE
Published: October 12, 2011
This isn’t meant to be a eulogy or an obit, just a reminder that music never exists in a vacuum — that every note, riff, beat, song and album is intrinsically contextual.
I say that because for the better part of the week leading up to Mikey’s death, I’d been listening on and off to an advance of Ashes & Fire (PAX-AM/Capitol) and, frankly, I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s not that I thought it was a bad album: Adams recorded it with veteran producer Glyn Johns (perhaps best known for his seminal work with The Who), recruited Norah Jones to play piano and sing background vocals, and deployed Tom Petty keyboardist Benmont Tench to add tasteful organ accompaniment to several of the disc’s well composed, artfully executed tracks. Nothing to complain about there. But something about the album — perhaps the very professionalism of it all — struck me as a bit bloodless. As I said, I just wasn’t feeling it.
Maybe I was just expecting something different from the mercurial Adams, who first emerged fronting the Raleigh-based alt-country band Whiskeytown in 1994, "playing make-up and wearing guitar," to steal a Paul Westerberg line. By ’97, Whiskeytown had fallen prey to ego, alcohol and music industry machinations; it looked as if Adams might be destined, in Westerberg’s words, to "grow old in a bar." But Adams rebounded from the Whiskeytown break-up fairly quickly. His first solo album, Heartbreaker, came out in 2000 on the Chicago indie label Bloodshot and featured a rather stellar alt-country cast, including Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Kim Richey and, as both producer and drummer, Glyn Johns’ son Ethan.
Since then, he’s made something of a habit of confounding expectations, both on stage and in the studio. After Universal’s Nashville-based Americana imprint Lost Highway signed him, he took a turn toward classic ’70s rock on 2001’s Gold, and in 2003 he went into full rockist mode on Rock N Roll, while simultaneously releasing a very singer-songwriterly pair of companion EPs titled Love Is Hell. Then, in 2005, as if he still felt he had something to prove, he put out three albums, returning to Whiskeytown roots with the double disc Cold Roses, trying out a little honky-tonk country on Jacksonville City Nights — both of which featured the versatile backing band the Cardinals — and getting back into solo folkster mode on 29. By the time Adams disbanded the Cardinals in 2009, they’d morphed into something of a rootsy jamband, willing and able to cover tunes by everyone from Alice In Chains to the Grateful Dead. As if that weren’t enough to demonstrate his mastery of genre, Adams wrote, recorded, and released entire on-line albums of punk, death metal and hip-hop under various pseudonyms.
Ashes & Fire, in contrast, is easily one of the most straightforwardly country, heart-on-my-sleeve, singer-songwriter albums in the Adams discography. There’s no tongue in his cheek this time, no winks or nods: Just 11 intimate, heartfelt, verse/chorus/verse tunes that play to Adams’ strengths as an affecting singer and gifted songwriter. From start to finish, Adams’ acoustic guitar and emotive voice are front-and-center, with strings, Jones’ piano and Tench’s keyboards adding subtle embellishments in just the right places. Indeed, the disc opens with Adams alone, slowly strumming the chords to "Dirty Rain" before gospel-inflected piano and a simple backbeat arrive to support the swinging cadence of Dylanesque verses like, "Last time I was here it was raining/It ain’t raining anymore/The streets were drowning/Waters waning/While the ruins washed ashore/I’m just looking through the rubble/Trying to find out who we were/Last time I was here it was raining/It ain’t raining anymore."
On the disc’s more raucous title track, a ragged, waltz-time meditation on love lost, Adams sounds like he’s channeling Nashville Skyline Dylan, singing cryptic rhymes like "Her eyes were indigo/The cats were all calico," in a slightly nasally tone. But ‘’’Come Home," a simple, fingerpicked ballad with quietly brushed drums, a touch of pedal-steel, and gorgeous harmonies by Jones, is the song that finally reeled me in. "Nobody has to cry to make it seem real," Adams sings, soft voiced and melancholy, with a stoic vulnerability that brings to mind a young Willie Nelson. ‘Nobody has to hide the way that they feel/If you stay right here, tomorrow you’ll be fine/I’ll be right here, standing by your side/So come home. . ."
Maybe it’s the artless beauty that caught my ear. Or it might have been the thought that my friend won’t be coming home. Either way, I’ve now only scratched the surface of an album that I’m destined to revisit again and again. And if that sounds corny, then so be it.
I say that because for the better part of the week leading up to Mikey’s death, I’d been listening on and off to an advance of Ashes & Fire (PAX-AM/Capitol) and, frankly, I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s not that I thought it was a bad album: Adams recorded it with veteran producer Glyn Johns (perhaps best known for his seminal work with The Who), recruited Norah Jones to play piano and sing background vocals, and deployed Tom Petty keyboardist Benmont Tench to add tasteful organ accompaniment to several of the disc’s well composed, artfully executed tracks. Nothing to complain about there. But something about the album — perhaps the very professionalism of it all — struck me as a bit bloodless. As I said, I just wasn’t feeling it.
Maybe I was just expecting something different from the mercurial Adams, who first emerged fronting the Raleigh-based alt-country band Whiskeytown in 1994, "playing make-up and wearing guitar," to steal a Paul Westerberg line. By ’97, Whiskeytown had fallen prey to ego, alcohol and music industry machinations; it looked as if Adams might be destined, in Westerberg’s words, to "grow old in a bar." But Adams rebounded from the Whiskeytown break-up fairly quickly. His first solo album, Heartbreaker, came out in 2000 on the Chicago indie label Bloodshot and featured a rather stellar alt-country cast, including Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Kim Richey and, as both producer and drummer, Glyn Johns’ son Ethan.
Since then, he’s made something of a habit of confounding expectations, both on stage and in the studio. After Universal’s Nashville-based Americana imprint Lost Highway signed him, he took a turn toward classic ’70s rock on 2001’s Gold, and in 2003 he went into full rockist mode on Rock N Roll, while simultaneously releasing a very singer-songwriterly pair of companion EPs titled Love Is Hell. Then, in 2005, as if he still felt he had something to prove, he put out three albums, returning to Whiskeytown roots with the double disc Cold Roses, trying out a little honky-tonk country on Jacksonville City Nights — both of which featured the versatile backing band the Cardinals — and getting back into solo folkster mode on 29. By the time Adams disbanded the Cardinals in 2009, they’d morphed into something of a rootsy jamband, willing and able to cover tunes by everyone from Alice In Chains to the Grateful Dead. As if that weren’t enough to demonstrate his mastery of genre, Adams wrote, recorded, and released entire on-line albums of punk, death metal and hip-hop under various pseudonyms.
Ashes & Fire, in contrast, is easily one of the most straightforwardly country, heart-on-my-sleeve, singer-songwriter albums in the Adams discography. There’s no tongue in his cheek this time, no winks or nods: Just 11 intimate, heartfelt, verse/chorus/verse tunes that play to Adams’ strengths as an affecting singer and gifted songwriter. From start to finish, Adams’ acoustic guitar and emotive voice are front-and-center, with strings, Jones’ piano and Tench’s keyboards adding subtle embellishments in just the right places. Indeed, the disc opens with Adams alone, slowly strumming the chords to "Dirty Rain" before gospel-inflected piano and a simple backbeat arrive to support the swinging cadence of Dylanesque verses like, "Last time I was here it was raining/It ain’t raining anymore/The streets were drowning/Waters waning/While the ruins washed ashore/I’m just looking through the rubble/Trying to find out who we were/Last time I was here it was raining/It ain’t raining anymore."
On the disc’s more raucous title track, a ragged, waltz-time meditation on love lost, Adams sounds like he’s channeling Nashville Skyline Dylan, singing cryptic rhymes like "Her eyes were indigo/The cats were all calico," in a slightly nasally tone. But ‘’’Come Home," a simple, fingerpicked ballad with quietly brushed drums, a touch of pedal-steel, and gorgeous harmonies by Jones, is the song that finally reeled me in. "Nobody has to cry to make it seem real," Adams sings, soft voiced and melancholy, with a stoic vulnerability that brings to mind a young Willie Nelson. ‘Nobody has to hide the way that they feel/If you stay right here, tomorrow you’ll be fine/I’ll be right here, standing by your side/So come home. . ."
Maybe it’s the artless beauty that caught my ear. Or it might have been the thought that my friend won’t be coming home. Either way, I’ve now only scratched the surface of an album that I’m destined to revisit again and again. And if that sounds corny, then so be it.
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