Ryan Adams - Gold

Ryan Adams once led the Raleigh, North Carolina-based alt-country outfit Whiskeytown, whose swan song Pneumonia finally saw the light of day earlier this year after being shelved for years following the 1998 Universal-Polygram merger.

Adams has always been a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll. He also has never sold as many records as many among the y’alternative crowd thought he would . . .or should have. It should come as no surprise, then, that Adams’s new solo album Gold has a vaguely country feel to it, nor should it be a surprise that it’s the most commercial-sounding album he’s recorded thus far.

He’s been a kid in North Carolina listening to country and bluegrass records with his grandmother. He’s been a teenage punk rocker. He’s been an alt-country pioneer with Whiskeytown. He’s even dated Alanis Morrisette and Winona Ryder. But Ryan Adams is a complicated guy, so now he wants to be your favorite pop star, too.

Gold is a sprawling album that deftly shuffles through the entire catalog of Adams’s influences--Gram Parsons, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Hank Williams, Paul Westerberg, Steve Earle, Keith Richards, Van Morrison, Tom Waits—blending essences of country, rock, folk, bluegrass, and blues. The new record finds Adams moving away from the hardcore honky tonk rock sound he favored while fronting Whiskeytown, opting instead for a slicker, Nashville countrypolitan approach to the classic singer/songwriter style.

He still likes to write bar room confessionals about relationships gone sour, but the arrangements on Gold are mostly acoustic guitar driven, backed by piano, Hammond B-3 organ, and the occasional strings and horns. On Gold, Adams’s reassembles his musical style into a new version of itself that’s bigger, brighter, kinder, and gentler—a artfully clumsy Americana that features songs mirrored by the album art—the artist posing wearing blues jeans in bed, surrounded by stereo equipment, a girl, a gun, a guitar, and ashtray, and a scattering of empty and half-empty bar glasses.

Perhaps it’s his anxiousness to try out his new sound that led to Adams recording so many songs during the Gold sessions. Gold has 16 tracks, and early pressings include a “Side 4” EP with an additional 5 tracks, and there are rumored to be many more leftovers from the sessions. Adams’s prolific talent as a songwriter is both a strength and a weakness.

He writes a hell of a lot of songs. The problem is that he writes a hell of a lot of good songs instead of struggling to write a few great ones. I have to wonder if perhaps the quality of the songs doesn’t suffer a little at the hand of quantity.

Gold, is a good album, with some very good songs, but because of a slightly uncomfortable-feeling effort toward commercialism, it’s not as successful as Ryan Adams’s previous solo effort, Heartbreaker, or Whiskeytown’s finale Pneumonia (which for all intents and purposes was Adams solo, too), which both are rougher and more authentic sounding, and display more consistent songwriting from track to track.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to reach for the banjo a little less often, but the real key to Ryan Adams future is whether or not he’s willing to slow down a little and allow himself to continue to mature as a songwriter.

--Matt Parks