There are two versions of Ryan Adams out there in the world jostling for your attention. There’s the singer/songwriter who plays it straight and, on some level, tries to appeal to a mainstream audience that still buys records—that’s the Ryan Adams who duets with Sheryl Crow and records albums like Gold and Easy Tiger, which are so precisely and tastefully wrought that they come off as almost lifeless. And then there’s the unreformed punk who loudly broadcasts his love of hardcore and black metal, who impulsively announces he’s quitting music just weeks before he releases another EP, who records a theme song for his website. This Ryan Adams releases one-offs like the Finger’s We Are Fuck You / Punk’s Dead Let’s Fuck and the metal sci-fi concept album Orion—most of which are funny-ha-ha for one or two listens, then are forever shelved.
Because they both fit a bit too perfectly into our preconceptions of selling out and keeping it real—concepts so old-fashioned in 2014 that they’re difficult to even type with a straight face—superficially, these two doppelgangers ought to exist in direct and even deadly opposition to one another. It’s not hard to imagine Ryan Adams the punk gobbing on Ryan Adams the serious singer/songwriter, and who wouldn’t buy tickets to see that? But the reality is, thankfully, much more complicated. Each Ryan Adams needs the other in order to survive in the music business; soundtrack placements, after all, bankroll hardcore EPs, which in turn provide a creative outlet for the kind of aggression and humor that aren’t typically prized by the roots-rock crowd.
These two Ryans duke it out on two of his new releases. The aptly titled Ryan Adams is a Ryan Adams album, not too far removed from his last few LPs even if it jettisons the twangy Americana for a different, darker, but no less historically grounded sound. The EP 1984 is the first in his Pax-Am Singles Series (which are essentially 7-inch billboards for his Hollywood studio) and lives up to its name by evoking the hardcore punk of the mid ‘80s. While these two releases seem to represent very different sides of the notoriously multi-faceted artist, they actually have a great deal in common. Both mine the past for inspiration and allow that inspiration to determine more of how the music sounds than it should, and both prove that there are no fine lines separating the various Ryan Adamses.
Released as a limited-edition 7” that quickly sold out in roughly an hour, 1984 wants to play like a super-obscure hardcore EP that you might find in a crate at the back of an ancient record store, stuck with bubblegum to the back of Negative Approach’s Tied Down. The playing is fast and furious, the tone predictably nostalgic, as Adams indulges his taste for musical extremes. Yet, for all its aggression and speed, the EP ultimately sounds like a bunch of catchy Ryan Adams songs played at twice the normal speed and truncated before they hit the two-minute mark. Slow them down, drag them out, and you’ve got a Cardinals album.
But the hardcore milieu imposes an intriguing set of restrictions on Adams, who played all the instruments himself. He knows the genre allots a very short amount of time to get his point across, so he arranges these songs to grab your attention quickly, either with a sharp guitar riff or an exaggerated vocal melody. He hits the first note of “What If You Were Wrong” almost before the song even starts, and he sings like he’s trying to outrun the scissoring guitars. "Change Your Mind" is all hook, condensed and concentrated, and “Rats in the Wall” flails wildly, barely holding together, until it explodes in a sample of broken glass. 1984 sounds like an exercise, a test to see if he can pare his songwriting down to its barest essentials: a straightforward lyrical sentiment, a catchy melody, and an off-the-cuff performance. Even though the EP ends up sounding repetitive and therefore much longer than its 15 minutes, Adams emerges as a careful craftsman with clear affection and reverence for the genre.
If that seat-of-his-pants release reveals Adams the punk as a serious artist, then this carefully planned self-titled album undercuts any self-seriousness he might possess as a singer/songwriter. On the cover of Ryan Adams, he looks perfectly stoned or possibly lobotomized, his hair exploding in the kind of bedhead bouffant that requires a lot of time and product. Even the title is delivered with a wink. Is that font Bryan Adams Serif Bold? Adams is too much of a rock nerd for that to be an accident, so it’s possible he’s trolling with a deliberately “bad” album cover for an album of well-crafted and well-behaved tunes released on Norah Jones’ label.
If the packaging is suspicious, the music itself offers a nice twist on the singer/songwriter mode. This time around, he’s less interested in the blah folk rock of the 2011 LP Ashes & Fire. In fact, with its murky production and throwback guitar sound, Ryan Adams sounds like it could have been recorded at any time between 1979 and 1987. There are period-specific nods to deep-cut Bryan Adams, Kenny Loggins, even Robbie Nevil and Richard fucking Marx. “Stay With Me” could be a synth-era Tom Petty tune, its snappy guitar theme recalling the Heartbreakers’ jangly dynamic, and “I Just Might” rustles up a rough guitar lick to conjure the Springsteen of "Brilliant Disguise". “Don’t wanna loose control, baby, I just might,” Adams sings in his best Bruce, but the song is so laden with specific references that it’s clear he’ll never have the chance to get too wild.
There aren’t your obvious touchstones, at least not for a guy sporting an Emperor backpatch on his denim jacket. Most of the time, Adams gets the sound just right without being too obvious about it, but some of these songs—specifically “Shadows” and “Let Go”—sound like they were written to fit this particular triangulation of influences. As a result, the rock-historical allusion rather than the music becomes an end in itself. On the other hand, Ryan Adams is a persuasively dark album, one defined by themes of struggle, instability, isolation, and regret. He sings like a man who knows something bad is going to interrupt each song. Adams may spend most of “Am I Safe” telling us that he’s having thoughts instead of telling us what those thoughts actually are, but that clipped acoustic strum conveys a potently jittery paranoia that says a lot more than the lyrics. On “Tired of Giving Up”, he admits that he’s “tired of giving up” and “tired of fighting,” as though this particular crisis offers no other options.
It seems impossible that Adams has never written a song called “My Wrecking Ball” before now, but that tune may be the best song on Ryan Adams, its austere arrangement conjuring the mood of a late-night drive to nowhere in particular. Musically, it recalls the directness and eloquence of Heartbreaker updated for 2014. “Hey, you’re my wrecking ball,” he sings, “won’t you come and maybe knock me down?” Perhaps he relishes the idea of romantic obliteration, perhaps he dreads it. But the song’s world-weariness is so intense that such destruction might actually revitalize him by giving him a chance to start over, build from the ground up, write, sing, and record with no preconceptions from himself, his fans, or anybody else. Ryan Adams may shed the confessional impulse in Adams' songwriting, but “My Wrecking Ball” plays like a deeply personal expression of creative paralysis and renewal.
