“New York, New York” starts off like The Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man”, “Answering Bell” and “The Rescue Blues” strain under the weight of The Band, while “Tina Toledo’s Street Walkin’ Blues” hitches a ride on a variant of Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” riff before wallowing in heavy Rolling Stones blooze. The stylistic mix is dizzying, from Dylanesque odes to Motown soul, but more than that, Adams’s influences are so prominent that you often feel like you’re listening to other people. As it turns out, he’s there, but you have to look really hard. A quick, cynical interpretation might be that the Ryan Adams we know is nowhere to be found on this record. Gold goes one step farther in constructing a shrine to Adams’s idols. More than anything else, Heartbreaker revealed a deep Dylan fetish, both in Adams’s spry arrangements and his sometimes hyperverbal lyrics. When Adams spread his solo wings on Heartbreaker, he bared all the influences that had been bubbling underneath. If “Dancing with the Women at the Bar” had roots in Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon”, you certainly couldn’t tell it on a casual listen. Ironically, this wasn’t so evident during his Whiskeytown youth, when he certainly tinkered with some alt-country boundaries, but never to the point where the band’s sound got lost. Part of that productivity stems from the fact that Adams is a musical sponge, and much like a bedroom-bound 16-year-old, he apparently tries to dissect and master any song or style that catches his fancy. In the face of such output, the question ultimately becomes: is all of it any good? Adams is so susceptible to the creative impulse that he reportedly once stopped in mid-set to explore an idea that popped into his head, and was assaulted by an irate fan for his trouble. His live shows traditionally contain songs that were written the night before, or even on the spot. Gold has been out a scant month, and supposedly Adams has already finished his Replacements-fueled Pinkhearts record, as well as another solo record, 48 Hours. Likewise, Gold was supposed to be two discs, but isn’t. Whiskeytown’s elegant swan song, Pneumonia, was supposed to be a double album, but half its songs disappeared along the way. He seems hell-bent on leaving this earth with more unreleased songs than Prince, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen combined. Adams was seemingly born with his creative floodgates wedged wide open, and a lot of songs are consequently languishing in unreleased obscurity. Here’s a Good Song You May Never Hear Again…Īpparently, the lesson we should all take from Ryan Adams is that his records aren’t finished until they’re in our hands - and even then there’s no guarantee he won’t revisit the songs later.
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