Jeff and Scot talk to Nicholas Confessore about Ryan Adams.
Introducing the Band
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) with guest Nicholas Confessore, investigative reporter for the New York Times, writer at large for the NYT Magazine, and MSNBC contributor. Follow Nick on Twitter at @nickconfessore, read his past work here, and also please do set aside some time for this remarkable long-form piece here.
Nick’s Musical Pick: Ryan Adams
The gang is extremely excited this week to be covering rocker/country-rocker/all-around-hyperprolific-polymath Ryan Adams, for this is not only one of our guest’s favorite artists, but perhaps co-host Scot’s as well. Scot explains how a chance encounter with Adams at a Chicago in-store performance back in 2000 led to a copy of Heartbreaker and a lifetime of fandom. Nick credits his buddy @JoshuaGreen for introducing him to Adams during their days as fellow wage-slaves at the Washington Monthly. Nick never thought of himself as a fan of country or country-rock, but he was fascinated by Adams’ guitar-playing and quirky songwriting style and before he knew it was teaching himself every song on Heartbreaker. Jeff found Ryan Adams immediately after 9/11, when a friend gave him a copy of Gold as a gift and “New York New York” was just the right song at the right time for him.
KEY TRACKS: “Amy” (Heartbreaker, 2000); “New York, New York” (Gold, 2001); “Jacksonville Skyline” [Whiskeytown](Pneumonia, 1999/2001)
Origins: Whiskeytown, the Classic Debut Heartbreaker, and the Overstuffed Follow-up Gold
Valiant fools that the gang are, they have set for themselves an impossible task: dealing with the ridiculously enormous Ryan Adams discography in less than five hours. This is a guy who released, like, sixteen albums in 2005 alone after all (the numbers there may be a bit off). That means that certain parts of Adams’ career must, alas, get short shrift, and the sting is felt in his original pre-solo career group, the great alt-country band Whiskeytown. Scot, Nick and Jeff all love this material, but there just isn’t time, so Scot gives his “60 second history of Whiskeytown” (extremely talented country-rock group driven by Adams’ singing and songwriting that collapsed under record label disasters and its own sheer gravity).
Then it’s on to Heartbreaker (2000), and the gang could have spent an hour on this album alone. Is it one of the greatest debut albums of all time? One of the greatest country-rock albums of all time? Is it even country at all? (Jeff, for one, thinks it owes far more to Bob Dylan and Neil Young than Nashville, despite Adams’ country background; already he was spreading his wings and refusing all stylistic straitjackets.) Scot declares Heartbreakerto be one of his favorite albums of all time, perhaps even his #1 pick. (Scot: “I can’t even be rational about it.”) Nick raves about how Adams creates an entire world with his soft, thoughtful folk melodies and lyrics: a New York City that isn’t quite New York and a Carolina that isn’t quite the real Carolina, but a magical, idealized version of both. Jeff marvels at how every song on Heartbreaker sounds like a standard — like people have been playing them for decades. And yet some young punk who came pretty much out of nowhere wrote them all, and did it on his first album. Jeff can’t even quite believe that “My Winding Wheel” was written; it just feels like it’s been kicking around Appalachia for a century or so.
Gold (2001) was Adams’ big grab for the brass ring (as Scot characterizes it), and its failings are telling, the gang agrees: here the first problematic tics of Adams’ career show up: over-prolificity, overstuffing his albums, and being a questionable judge of the quality of his own material. (Nick complains that many of the best songs were left off the original album and only released on a “Side 4” bonus disc that isn’t even commercially available anymore — and he’s right!) But Jeff will walk through fire t