The Record Business is Hell

As the story goes, Ryan Adams recorded an album’s worth of music after an emotional collapse of a romantic kind. The recordings were therefore not exactly upbeat. But Adam’s record company, Lost Highway, was looking for a blockbuster follow-up to Adams hit CD, Gold. This, they thought, was not it. So they convinced him to return to the recording studio, which he did, and make some more positive music that maybe you can dance to. So he whipped up some songs in a day and recorded them almost as rapidly

The record company released that instead, titled Rock N Roll (although to be true to the artistic intent, that should be spelled backwards.) But the agreement with Adams was they would, at the same time, release one-half of that original downer of a CD in a separate EP volume, but with no marketing effort behind it. They would follow up with the other half in another EP a month later. And Lost Highway pushed Rock N Roll. But that record was not much of a hit after all. So six months later, Lost Highway released the original record in one CD, Love is Hell.

I decided to buy that CD for some reason (I think it was the two Moretti La Rossas I had that night at Polcari's with my daughter,) and I’m stunned. I had purchased the first EP, but I guess it got caught up in my dislike for Rock N Roll. I never purchased the second. I was a big fan of Whiskeytown, and thoroughly enjoyed both of his official solo releases, Heartbreaker and Gold. But Rock N Roll, except for a few highlights, sucked.

But the complete CD, Love is Hell, is unbelievably good. The critical consensus is that it sounds too much like The Smiths. To hell with the critics. Sure, there’s a taste of The Smiths. But I can hear Elliot Smith as well. Not to mention John Lennon and Paul Simon, and countless others. But Ryan Adam’s genius, to my mind, is his power of synthesis. He can take the disparate sounds of the last forty years and give them new life in a sound all his own.

There's strange weather in the back of the room
And she's pretty, Jesse's spinning the tunes
Eyelashes, and some white leather boots
God, what have I been drinking?
I could be serious but I'm just kiddin' around
I could be anything, anything but sticking around
Love is hell

Now if he can just stop the posing and concentrate on writing a few good songs at a time.