"La Cienega Just Smiled," from the excellent 2001 album Gold, is a perfect illustration of Adams' craft. Lyrics of love and dislocation, a perfect country-tinged guitar, and a beautiful piano, all tied together with an acute sense of country-rock's finest songwriting traditions. Named after a street in Los Angeles, Adams chronicles his fond upheaval from L.A. to New York.
Why listen? In a long line of songwriting formalism rooted in a folk-country-rock ethic, Adams delivers a glowing example of the tradition's seemingly tireless appeal.
Something else? "New York, New York" "Desire," "Two," "Answering Bell," "When the Stars Go Blue," "Starting to Hurt, "So Alive," "This Is It," "Let It Ride" "How Do You Keep Love Alive," "Everybody Knows," "I Taught Myself How to Grow Old," "Follow the Lights," "Fix It," "If I Am a Stranger," or even his cover of "Wonderwall." (Hey, the man seriously has a bevy of good tunes, and many of them aren't even on youtube.)
5 comments:
I am going to disagree with you on this one. Ryan Adams should be much higher than #26. I think that Two or Desire might be better than your choice, or at least equal. But I guess you can only choose one. All I can say is that the top 25 must be pretty awesome . . .
Disagree: Ryan Adams deserves to be in the top ten. Agree: La Cienega is his best song to date.
I may or may not have cried myself to sleep with this song more than a few times. Ryan knows my soul.
Ladies, ladies. The D Man loves him some Ryan Adams too. I own every album. And I drink Whiskeytown up like the bar is ready to close. Adams can write songs in his sleep.
And yes, The Top 25 is pretty damn awesome . . .
Adams may be at a disadvantage in a list like this for writing so many great songs in a traditional vein. He makes it look so easy that perhaps The D Man should reconsider moving him much higher. Indeed, if this were solely a list for the best artists of the decade then, yes, Adams would be fighting for a Top Ten spot. But leaning towards the "aesthetics of strangeness" and those artists who have appeared to overcome the "anxiety of influence" (two Bloomian criticisms), The D Man has perhaps given slightly more credit to those artists who have structurally, sonically, or lyrically taken things to new and exciting places. Don't get me wrong, Adams is exciting--he just feels and sounds like home. But home, whether real or imagined, will be around for a long, long time.
I would agree with you on this one. Even Timmy Mcgraw had to swipe When the Stars Go Blue. With Adams, you may have a solid argument with the old English Professor in High School that used to argue Bob Dylans greatness as a song writer every week.
I will protest outside your office until Adams is in the top 10.
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