Rock N Roll

Ryan Adams is the male Courtney Love -- a hard-working hustler with impeccable taste who talks such a good game it deliberately overshadows his music. Of course, Adams differs from Courtney in many crucial ways. For one, he's a workaholic, recording and releasing more albums than he should, which also points out that, unlike Love, he doesn't need a collaborator to help shove his songs over the goal. But the crucial similarity is that they're both students of rock history, conscious of what accounts for good taste within rock crit land, from 1973 to 2003. They don't just know the canon -- they want to be part of the canon, to the extent that it seems that they want to be the artist that all rock history has inextricably pointed to (or to paraphrase the far more eloquent Morrissey, they want to be the end of the family line). Which is why it rankles Adams when he's pigeonholed as an alt-country singer/songwriter (he's right -- he hasn't been alt-country since he left Whiskeytown) when Jack White steals his spotlight by doing a related, but not similar, spin on roots rock: he's so clearly the Important Artist of the Decade that he needs to pull the spotlight back on himself whenever it's shining somewhere else. With Gold in the fall of 2001, the wind was at his back -- his enfant terrible shtick was still relatively fresh, "New York, New York" became a post-9/11 anthem, and the music was eclectic enough to break him out of the alt-country ghetto, even as it was rootsy enough to still play to that core audience. By 2003, things were getting a little dicey for Adams, partially because he wouldn't shut up -- either to the press or on his online blog; he said many things to both, the most noteworthy being a bizarre pseudofeud with the White Stripes, where he yo-yoed between calling Jack White a genius and kid's stuff -- and partially because he had diarrhea of the recording studio, cutting more stuff than Lost Highway could possibly release, particularly because he was moving further away from the label's core alt-country audience. They released the demos collection Demolition in 2002 but balked at Love Is Hell, his mope-rock tribute recorded with Smiths producer John Porter, but after some discussion, it was decided that Love Is Hell would surface as a pair of EPs, while Lost Highway would get a big, shiny new rock & roll record. ... Read More...