Ryan Adams "Easy Tiger"

I find Ryan Adams very hit or miss, but when he hits, they are titanic upper-deck moonshots.

That being said, I have only listened to the new disc 2-3 times and haven't been overly impressed. I'll give it another few spins as soon as I can stop listening to the new Interpol.

We actually got into a bit of a discussion on this in the Jason Isbell* thread. The new Adams album is easily the best thing he's put out since Gold. He stopped trying to be other people (the dark, haunted pop singer on Love Is Hell, the 80s mainstream rocker on Rock and Roll, the Grateful Dead on Cold Roses) and got back to the slightly tarted up and polished roots rock that he nailed on Pneumonia and Gold.

Now, if he'd just make a proper, low-key acoustic drunken melancholy follow-up to Heartbreaker, we'd know for sure that he's back in business.

* For you Adams fans who haven't heard Isbell yet, you should absolutely check him out (either his new album or on the Drive-By Truckers' twin masterpieces, Decoration Day and the Dirty South). He's like Adams with a much smaller, but more consistent repertoire, better lyrics, and way better guitars.

Good to hear. Awhile back, a friend's boyfriend was positively Browncoatesque in his love for Adams and it sort of turned me off. Fortunately, I fell for the charms of "Strangers Alamanac" without making the connection and subsequently fell in love with first "Pneumonia" and then "Gold."

Can someone handicap the other 47 Adams albums? I like what I've heard enough to eventually work through most of his catalogue, I suspect, but it'd be good to know what is essential and what can be skipped.

Ryan Adams' officially released albums, from best to worst:

1. Gold (2001)
2. Easy Tiger (2007)
3. Demolition (2002)
4. Rock N Roll (2003)
5. Heartbreaker (2000)
6. Cold Roses (2005)
7. Jacksonville City Nights (2005)
8. Love is Hell (2004)
9. 29 (2005)

And that is the truth.

By the way, Ryan has a four-disc boxed set coming out this winter. It includes two complete, unreleased albums and two discs full of unreleased songs, B-sides and alternate cuts.

Sorry, but any such list without Heartbreaker at the top ain't even close to the truth.

The Truth:

1. Heartbreaker (if we were talking about Whiskeytown, I'd put Pneumonia up here, too)
2. Gold
3. Easy Tiger
3.5. (If we were including unofficial stuff, a bunch of it would be right here, since, from this point down, every release is spotty in some way or another)
4. Demolition
5. Jacksonville City Nights
6. Love Is Hell
7. Rock'n'Roll
8. Cold Roses (if this were only one disc, it would probably be a few notches up)
9. 29

Here's the thing. I pretty much love every Adams album except for Love is Hell, which I only like, and 29, which I downright loath. (That's okay. Everyone's allowed one awful album. Even Pearl Jam made Binaural.)

Heartbreaker is a fantastic album, but I enjoy it when Adams rocks out for a couple of cuts during an album. Heartbreaker has very little of that, which you know, DaveB, since you yourself called it "low-key" and "melancholy."

Although, as we all know, Rock N Roll consists ENTIRELY of what its title implies and offers up little of the slow and soulful Ryan Adams. For that reason, I have no problem switching Rock N Roll and Heartbreaker on my list. But the fact remains, neither can place higher than #4.

By the way, Cold Roses would be higher if you took the few bad songs off disc two and replaced them with the few good songs off disc one. Taken as a whole, though, it's kind of a bloated mess with one CD's worth of quality songs on it.

I think Heartbreaker's gotta be tops just because of the quality of the songwriting, no matter how diverse or not diverse it is (though there are actually a couple of up-tempo songs on it). Blood on the Tracks might be my favorite Dylan album, and it maintains a similarly consistent tone.

If you want diverse, there's always Gold, but the problem with Adams and diversity is that even on a relatively solid album like Gold, you get a couple clunkers because he seems to think he needs "a song like this" just to balance out the rest (for instance, is the maudlin "Sylvia Plath" really any competition for the more honest-sounding, similarly low-key songs on Heartbreaker?). With Heartbreaker, he stayed focused, and it paid off.

Rock'n'Roll could have paid off, too, but it comes off as underwritten and overproduced. Most disappointingly, he'd already demo'ed rougher, more rock-oriented stuff ("Clearly Destroyed," which I guess is technically a Whiskeytown song, may be one of the best rockers he's written to date), so you've gotta wonder why he essentially released a sort of half-baked guitar-pop album. It didn't even make for a very convincing attempt at mainstream success.

I'm with Dave. That list has to start with Heartbreaker. After that, it's a pretty big jump to No. 2, although I haven't yet listened to Easy Tiger.

No. No, it's not. Point for Dave.

Although I'm a big fan of The Bar is a Beautiful Place, which is on Side Four, the Gold bonus disc, if you happen to have it.

Obviously, I adore Gold, but there are indeed a couple of clunkers toward the end of it. They could have been replaced with Bar and Cannonball Days, two fantastic songs that somehow didn't make the cut. That would have made an already great album even greater.

Downloaded "Heartbreaker" and it is indeed what I was hoping for. [Edited to add: Thanks! to all]. Maybe I'll get "Easy Tiger" and quit while I'm ahead.

Funny thing about every album I've heard from Adams (including Whiskeytown) is there's always a song or two that you think you've heard before, only a little bit better.

Funny. I've got a CD changer in my trunk and am VERY lazy about reloading it (I just use the in-dash), and "Gold" has been in the trunk for so long that I forgot there was another disc. Now I wonder where the hell that jewel case is?

My favorite Ryan Adams albums:

Gold
Jacksonville City Nights
Cold Roses
48 Hours (unreleased, recorded in, you guessed it, 2 days after he finished Gold)
Easy Tiger
Heartbreaker

29 is worth it only for a couple tunes.

Rock n' Roll is almost worthless to me, as is Love is Hell.