ACKsonville Skyline? No? Anyway, why we still love Ryan Adams' crazy:

Various music for the morning.

Electro Snake, Ryan Adams. My favorite part of the song is how the title is two words. That's not to say I don't enjoy the rest of it. It's a mix of the Rock and Roll loud jangle and Ryan's pre-Whiskeytown screamers. I like that. I wish I could comment on the rest of the album, but it hasn't surfaced anywhere. (Ryan is only selling the album on fancy vinyl with no previews. Other songs include Imminent Galactic War and Ghorgon, Master of War. And now the album's sold out. So, after the spelling and the song, my third favorite part has to be this reader comment on the album art, "I would note that the typeface appears (without checking) to be the one designed for the Mexico City Olympics of 1968."

I Should Have Known It, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. A new song so fuzzy-good that Petty and the band look surprised to be playing it. Lacks any nuance, especially in late in it, but I like how they recorded live with no overdubs and I've played it too many times this week.

Mixtape, Tift Merritt. Recently an NPR Music song of the day. I was all kinds of skeptical about the strings at first, but the more I listen, the more I like them. (The rest of the album hasn't done this for me yet.) The phrasing is perfect, too. Lyrics alone nearly don't do justice. Still: "Rewind, it comes to an end, turns over again, another a thousand times / Me, I'll be the same, no I never change, I'm like a rare B-side."

Panic Switch (Live at KROQ), Silversun Pickups. You know I love this song, and an airing live and loud is fantastic. Here, though, we get a near-acoustic version. Works. For such a juiced-up, electric song, you see in the video how the best of those songs have unplugged roots.

Month of May, Arcade Fire. Via Kellen. No opinion yet. (That's a lie. I like it but have found no emotional connection yet. Not sure I'll find one.)

Cotton Fields, CCR. Because I sang it in the shower.

The song I first wanted to blog last night was the one above. Outside is inside, feeling is nothing, emptiness is guitar strum and Caitlin Cary wailing, the rain that comes down is sound enough to sing enough to dream for or against anything surrounding. The bigger picture matters, but not so much as the end of the thought, the end of the storm. But I couldn't find any of this to say last night, and I spent an hour or two finding four lines to write about a Faces' deep cut. I got to learn about the Jeff Beck Group, find out what a plinth was, wonder what Shelley and Trafalgar Square meant decades ago, and take a guess as to why we don't know anything. Some level of understanding was enough to end the day. People think knowledge is what counts, and that's not it. Understanding something, anything, seems to be more what it takes to be okay, and if there isn't someone, you need something. I started work early tonight, on the hustle to Metro. Breathless cold, no good.

"Monday hurts just like the weekend / Closed promenades and a beer / And everything's so close to leavin' / It's funny anyone comes here."

From spring 2001's Cowboy Technical Sessions, which also yielded the origins of My Love for You Is Real (yes, years later the standout on the Follow the Lights EP) and the ridiculous Liar. Various torrents around. I got my weekend, upbeat guitar on a sad song, and you got yours.

If the original is right for a cloudy day, this demo version is perfect for a rainy day. Which it is, in this region. "It's a bummer," the local weather blog says. Weather aside, though, I've had this track up all week. The direct link is here, but the context is on This Mornin' I Am Born Again.

I thought at first … well, after the first several dozen plays … the demo had a slower pace, but finally switching to the finished take, only the chorus was slower. Then I thought it was the drums. The drums were so prominent on the finished version and not on the demo at all. But I switched back to the demo and there was a drumbeat. Obviously, the final cut had more, louder drums, but they weren't the real difference.

What was? The backing vocals. Kim Ritchey did the album's, random people live. Beyond sound, the song meant one thing when a second voice joined the chorus. The song meant another when no one did.

I couldn't find a take I liked of Come Pick Me Up this morning, so Muppets and Legos were subs written in advance (shocker). But driving up the parkway, I got to feeling good about one clip I'd seen, even if it was muted for TV. Worth a five-minute break at my desk, probably tradeable for the hours they'll get from me later.

What I love about the song today is exactly what's undefinitive in the way people respond to it. Says Ryan Adams himself on the lyrics page: "I wrote this today.  It probably sucks." Says a book blogger: "I don't know if this song will make you feel better after a break-up, it could make you feel a whole lot worse and perhaps even force you on a bender. It has that sort of bend. God, it hurts and I'm happy." Says a SongMeanings.net poster, "It is the song I want to dance to at my wedding." Says the next one, "Not a song I'd picture at a wedding." The song and all of these people leave me in a good mood.

The rest of that thread produces no agreement except around the classicism of life screwed up — whether that's a good thing, when that's a good thing, whether you're looking out or looking in — and around how the song's so good. Readers here may have their own perfected interpretations, but as Ryan says, they probably suck.

After listening to Demolition early last week, Ryan Adams' new one and his Whiskeytown work Strangers Almanac arrived in the mail near week's end. I'm not sure if the new one, Easy Tiger, beats Cold Roses for me. I don't think it does. But the best of the new bunch are the kind that draw you in like Come Pick Me Up. When you break them apart from the album's noise, I put Sun Also Sets and Pearls on a String up there so far. They're open but obscured, where Cold Roses was open and unadorned. Both moods are viable, and the former is harder to write. Not harder to write alone, but with a narrative.

Strangers Almanac is good there. There's not a bone in its wax that would let it ignore the narrative, because the narrative is everything. Music's just a way to get there, and obscured and unadorned are whatever it takes. Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight has been the song on my lips the last week or so, pretty much since the moment Demlition night ended in a forfeit. It's the version from the Faithless Street reissue, but the Strangers cut — newer to me — fortifies it. It's the anchor on the first listen, and it's destruction for a purpose.

The comments here were on their way back almost from the second they left, and I think I got it pretty quick but not quick enough to hold up the whole thing. Couldn't have if I tried, or wouldn't have wanted to. Some days you just lower your arms. Yesterday I archived the old comments, preserving them, and put in Blogger's comment system. The old one, YACCS, had stopped upgrades and support a year-plus ago, bowing to systems like Blogger's and desiring to invest time elsewhere. It was great while it lasted. But I was ready for it to go too and was glad to get the high sign to walk away. The new system offered comments on a per-post basis, which was what I needed.

When I write in Blogger now, the interface has passed me by. The words hit the keyboard a couple letters after my head, and they hit the screen a few more frustrating letters behind. By the time all the letters are down and they with the words are in the right order, the feeling to get them out the door is strong. If that feeling was the feeling sitting down to write, the emotion is double. In those times, I don't want to stick around and I don't want to come back. I want to push the chalkboard into the street and let an unexpected big-rig smash it to bits. It's a different contract of interaction, building and clearly noting an exception. Turning a post's comments off, every once in a while, satisfies the clause.

When comments weren't here, I went looking for them. If only mentally before cutting myself off, I checked. They had never come in bunches, but the chance was there. They'd also predicated my yesterday. I went to bed Saturday not knowing what I'd done, and woke up today with at least the interactive contract in hand. It would've been helpful a day or a week earlier, and it was too late except to go forward. I spent the day with Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, recommended in comments here by a couple friends. The book, the best about reading I've ever read, was what I needed to come back to zero.

You need it too, as long as you can sit still long enough to read every word. Maybe you can read it, find your legs stretched at full extension and wonder with the sensation how long it'd been since you'd let them do as much. You then switch positions and spots dozens of times; as much as you enjoy the stretched feeling, you're doing what you can. You watch the reflection of the sun go down, especially gold on the cap of the new high-rise down the street, and you remember that poem and how it was sad. You wait for the thunderstorm and type out the excerpts that mess with your head, the ones on comments and control that begin to sample the book. None of them describe anything fully, and you know you have to do better than description.

And just as I watch her while she reads, suppose she were to train a spyglass on me while I write? I sit at the desk with my back to the window, and there, behind me, I feel an eye that sucks up the flow of the sentences, leads the story in directions that elude me. Readers are my vampires. I feel a throng of readers looking over my should and seizing the words as they are set down on paper. I an unable to write if there is someone watching me: I feel that what I am writing does not belong to me any more. I would like to vanish, to leave behind for that expectation lurking in their eyes the page stuck in the typewriter, or, at most, my fingers striking the keys.

How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes … Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to trasmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells.

Perhaps the woman I observe with the spyglass knows what I should write; or, rather, she does not know it, because she is in fact waiting for me to write what she does not know; but what she knows for certain is her waiting, the void that my words should fill.

—

Idea for a story. Two writers, living in two chalets on opposite slopes of the valley, observe each other alternately. One of them is accustomed to write in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Mornings and afternoons, the writer who is not writig trains his spyglass on the one who is writing.

One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer. The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages. In a little while the book will be finished: certainly a best seller — the tormented writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy. He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning out machine-made novels catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self-confidence. It is not only envy, it is also admiration, yes, sincere admiration: in the way that man puts all of his energy into writing there is certainly a generosity, a faith in communication, in giving others what others expect of him, without creating introverted problems for himself. The tormented writer would give anything if he could resemble the productive writer; he would like to take hm as a model; his greatest ambition now is to become like him.

The productive writer watches the tormented writer as the latter sits down at his desk, chews his fingernails, scratches himself, tears a page to bits, gets up and goes into the kitchen to fix himself some coffee, then some tea, then camomile, then reads a poem by Holderlin (while it is clear that Holderlin has absolutely nothing to do with what he is writing), copies a page already written and then crosses it all out line by line, telephones the cleaner's (though it was settled that the blue slacks couldn't be ready before Tuesday), then writes some notes that will not be useful now but maybe later, then goes to the encyclopedia and looks up Tasmania (though it is obvious that in what he is writing there is no reference to Tasmania), tears up two pages, puts on a Ravel recording. The productive writer has never liked the works of the tormented writer; reading them, he always feels as if he is on the verge of grasping the decisive points, but then it eludes him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness. But now that he is watching him write, he feels this man is struggling with something obscure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where; at times he seems to see the other man walking on a tightrope stretched over the void, and his is overcome with admiration. Not only admiration, also envy; because he feels how limited his own work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.

On the terrace of a chalet in the bottom of the valley a young woman is sunning herself, reading a book. The two writers observe her with the spyglass….

—

You fasten your seatbelt. The plane is landing. To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same. You might as well stick with this other abstraction of travel, accomplished by the anonymous uniformity of typographical characters: here, too, it is the evocative power of the names that persuades you that you are flying over something and not nothingness. You realize that it takes considerable heedlessness to entrust yourself to unsure instruments, handled with approximation; or perhaps this demonstrates an invincible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile dependence. (But are you reflecting on the air journey or on reading?)

I finally got a chance to listen to the Jacksonville City Nights MP3s this morning. I know they're only half the album, but overall I'm not thrilled. There's no Jacksonville Skyline here.

Please don't confuse my take for nothing-great-after-Heartbreaker view. The spring's Cold Roses remains in heavy rotation on my playlists, and I think a one-disc mix would have been up there with any release he's done. Jacksonville is a different project, aiming much more country and western, and Adams deserves his usual credit for stretching horizons. But after just listening to half, I think he also deserves his usual criticism: Where's the editor? Where's the self-editing? He's got a mess again here, and it's not even as complicated as it usually is.

Dear John (lyrics) has Norah Jones and Adams loping over each other to frustrating effect, and I can't buy Jones whispering, "Ten years passed / And I ended up with a house full of cats." Adams writes so well about missing people, but he's yet to write about death in any convincing fashion.

Work neither. That's The Hardest Part's problem. The tune is pretty downplayed, so we've gotta focus on the words. The company store? The company boys? Sure, the song quickly gets into the work of love, but — employment, love or music — Adams doesn't have enough credibility in any type of work to claim "the hardest part is working and I've worked enough."

And let's throw God in there while we're at it. Peaceful Valley (lyrics) could easily be When Ryan Adams Talks to God (and Wears a Cowboy Hat). He's got his country yodel in full effect and seems to have some misplaced yearning for CMT rotation. We've got the peaceful valley, "cities of gold," "a gun to my head," and the kicker:

Up there in the clouds
In that glorious kingdom
Tell me there ain't nothing but an easy recline
Can I still smoke my cigarettes and have my coffee
Up there in heaven with a bottle of wine

I would've gone with "easy cheer/bottle of beer" or "life without fear/bottle of bear" or, were I feeling particularly high in the saddle, "field full of steer/bottle of beer." But that's just me. I also would've gone with listening instead to Elvis' Peace in the Valley.

My Heart Is Broken thankfully breaks the losing streak. It's a good one. It's also a Whiskeytown song, AnsweringBell explains. Finding out this link, the first thing that comes to mind is how Amanda's husband Charlie files his Adams albums under "W" for Whiskeytown "because it was a better band." This song is a better song. It's short. It's sad. It makes you want to mosey and sing along.

Things revert to the work problem with Trains. "I've been working hard ever since I was a kid" is the line. Musically, the MP3 poster/blogger is right, the guitars here are more interesting than elsewhere, but when you stack them against the pantheon of locomotive-like chugging songs, they tumble way down the list. Trains expect better art.

Withering Heights (lyrics) attempts nothing in death, work or God's direction, and it's my favorite song of the bunch. I'm still getting past some Bronte issues, but I'm confident of success. There's a delicacy here that makes legitimate even "the moon shines on the boulevard baby let's ride." No matter how many times the words have been said or the sentinments have been expressed, they can always mean something if you want them to, and Adams sounds like he means them here. With the guitar and piano in place as well, picking and plinking, he pulls off the balancing act.

The closing Don't Fail Me Now (lyrics) has moments of that level of clarity — the opening piano and strings, the swinging door enunciation of "your darkened eyes." But the missteps quickly outpace them. There's gratuitous use of "gal," overreliance on "Just don't fail me now / You don't do me right," some annoyingly quiet whispers of Hollywood-style Western lines, and a melodramatic musical climax. If those troubles aren't enough, the song is formerly known to Adams' fans as When The Rope Gets Tight. So when you take a few minutes and listen for yourself to all these songs, be mindful. There's gonna be a hangin'.

I heard a bunch of new (to me) music this weekend, thanks to a friend. Included was a Ryan Adams show from December in Chicago, a show that was slammed by Jim Derogatis of the Sun-Times but turned out to be pretty enjoyable from where I was listening just now.

Highlighting the main set was Wish You Were Here from the fall's Rock N Roll album. First, Adams played the album version. Then he played the speed metal version. Then he played the country swing version.

Then he played the Cookie Monster version.

Cotton candy and a rotten mouth
You're so fucked up
I couldn't help but have it for cookie
Everybody knows the way walk
Knows the way I talk
Knows the way I feel about cookie
It's all a bunch of cookie
And there's nothing to eat around here
(Inaudible line)
I'm totally so hungry
I wish you were cookie

Last fall we discussed Pitchfork's review of Ryan Adams' Rock N Roll and vented on life some; now Adams has found the review as well and practically called them up just to talk. The site's posted the interview.