RYAN ADAMS
PERSONNEL:
RYAN ADAMS: Vocals, All Guitars, Bass Guitar and Other Instruments
JOHNNY T. YERINGTON: Drums and Percussion
with
JASON BOESEL: Drums on "Do You Still Love Me?"
DANIEL CLARKE: Organ on "Do You Still Love Me?"
CHARLIE STAVISH: Bass Guitar on "Do You Still Love Me?" "Tightrope" and "We Disappear"
JOE SUBLETT: Saxophone on "Tightrope"
MIKE VIOLA: Guitar on "Do You Still Love Me?"
All music and lyrics by Ryan Adams except
"Do You Still Love Me?" music and lyrics by Ryan Adams and Daniel Clarke
"Prisoner" music and lyrics by Ryan Adams and Mike Viola
Produced by Ryan Adams
Released February 17, 2017
"Without U there is no me..."
-Prince ("Adore")
Who are we when we fall in love? Who were we before and even after? How do we change and alter ourselves and sometimes, even lose ourselves as we attempt to merge our being with that of another individual?
Compromise and communication are indeed touchstones for potentially successful relationships but when we do compromise and how we communicate do indeed go straight to the core of our individualized beings and how we again alter ourselves just to remain romantically attached. And say, one is part of a relationship where love is strong but somehow not enough, one where the ebbs and flows are dynamic, threatening to untie the bonds? Or what if indeed the relationship concludes and each partner now finds themselves living within an aftermath. Who are we even then? Do we remain the same or are we figuring out just precisely what we may have become? And what if we have lost ourselves in another and lost? How do we even begin to find our way back to ourselves?
I bring those questions and concepts to the table as I find myself listening to Ryan Adams' latest opus, his 16th album entitled "Prisoner." While Adams clearly wears his heart upon his denim encased sleeves and is certainly not new to the arena of musically chronicling tales of love and loss--especially as his passionately beloved debut solo album is entitled "Heartbreaker" (released September 5, 2000) and one (or two) of his very best releases, the startling two-part EP set "Love Is Hell" (released November 4, 2003/December 9, 2003)--it feels more than fitting that his most recent material may be strongly perceived as being achingly personal to the point of being strikingly confessional.
I feel compelled to give the proper credit where it is due regarding the following. Shortly before the release of the album, the advance reviews were being released and I happened upon one written by Ryan Leas of Stereogum. In his article, Leas suggested that maybe what Adams has given us this time is the third installment of a trilogy of sorts as the self titled album "Ryan Adams" (released September 8, 2014) preceded the announcement of his divorce from actress/singer Mandy Moore by several months represented the first installment and "1989" (released September 21, 2015), Adams' gorgeous top to bottom cover version of the Taylor Swift album he adored while caught in throes of emotional loss represented the difficult middle section.
As I listened to "Prisoner" for the first time, I felt myself returning to those words in the Stereogum article because they felt so very right to me, regardless of whether Ryan Adams himself ever fully addresses, confirms or denies the full emotional and artistic intent of the work(s). Even so, there was a certain emotional weight to the music that felt somewhat...different than on albums past. A considerably deeper and more painful emotional pull towards looking inwards at my own life and entanglements as well as those of the more universal romantic variety plus Adams' personal situation within the dissolution of his marriage. By album's end, and with that inexplicable feeling of having traveled down some especially mournful roads, I was unquestionably moved by the experience, therefore making Ryan Adams' "Prisoner" a work of uncompromising and acutely powerful, open-hearted fragility as well as existing as the first great work that I have heard in this beginning of the 2017 year in music.
I do have to mention at this time, that as "Prisoner" began, I was whisked to a motion picture that made a serious impression upon me many years ago. The film is Alan Parker's "Shoot The Moon" (1982), an emotionally brutal film which delves into the infidelity and marital dissolution of characters portrayed by Albert Finney and Diane Keaton and the aftershocks that occur upon them and their four children, one of whom a volatile teenager played by the late Dana Hill. As the film opens, we are privy to an interior moment, the likes of which we typically never see in the movies, the husband, in private, lost in tears and becoming unglued with the knowledge that his life is about to be irrevocably changed.
I brought up this memory of this particular film because to my ears, Ryan Adams' "prisoner" opens within the same fashion with a song of stunning vulnerability, "Do You Still Love Me?," a track that feels like a purposeful yet more despairing echo of the "Ryan Adams" opening track, "Gimmie Something Good." Much has already been written about the pseudo/retro1980's AOR power ballad framework, a la Foreigner, for instance. Backed by terrific swirling cathedral organ, heroic power chords and a flat-out killer chorus, Adams playfully and expertly creates an album overture that functions equally as air guitar fuel and aching lament for a romantic reciprocation that once existed but just might not anymore.
My own response to the song has changed quite considerably since the song was first released as a single. I was immediately captivated by the song's instantly attention grabbing charm, swagger and the soaring quality of Adams' increasingly remarkable vocals (and of course, that organ!) but with each listen, "Do You Still Love Me?" grows sadder and sadder, painfully unveiling the confusion and that lost-in-the-universe feeling that occurs when your soulmate departs, leaving you all alone to try and make sense of a forever changed world all over again. By the album's second song, the title track, the heaviness apparent within "Do You Still Love Me?" begins to carry a woeful, melancholic gravity.
As Ryan Adams sings of a heart still caught in the throes of a love now ended, I found myself locking tightly onto the song's themes of emotional emancipation deferred as the past continues to hold its grasp. "Clock don't know what your memories do," he sings. "They're stacking up beside the bed/I count 'em every night inside my head/If loving you is wrong. I am a criminal/Mmmm...I am a prisoner." As the bed of acoustic guitars find the strength to continue laying the musical ground work, the lonely harmonica wails on...
The album next brings us to "Doomsday," a song of romantic promises made and romantic promises broken ("My love, you said you'd love me now 'til doomsday comes") leaving our narrator disillusioned and dilapidated. "Haunted House" details the emotions of now living alone within a home, mind and heart filled with ghosts of the past, unable to escape from. And the stark, exposed nerve endings of "Shiver And Shake" gives the album one of its many high points. Ryan Adams simply nails the interior turmoil while creating a musical backdrop that is subtle and even disturbingly quiet, the sparse instrumentation refusing to find itself getting in the way of the actual message that Adams is trying to convey: a message of wounded emotional paralysis due to the loss of a love. From here, the first half of "Prisoner" culminates with the meditative, forlorn "To Be Without You."
"It's so hard to be without you
Used to feel so angry, and now I only feel humble
Stinging from the storm inside my ribs where it thunders
Nothing left to say or really even wonder
We are like a book and every page is so torn
Nothing really matters anymore"
Beyond the continuous and varying themes of loneliness and newfound aloneness, Ryan Adams' "Prisoner" extends to the excellent "Anything I Say To You Now," a song of how the communication and even the very language that once flowed so effortlessly entirely fails after a breakup.
Emotional and psychological stability come into question on the self-explanatory "Breakdown," on which Adams sings, "Was I dreaming did I lose something in the night? Did I lose you? Did I lose you? Maybe I'm sleeping and in the morning I will only see the sunshine. Did I lose you? Did I lose my mind?"
"I got this aching in my chest/Rollin' around like a pile of bones/In a broken little box/It sounds a lot like you/Laughing to yourself/In a quiet room/Our eyes knowing more than they probably ought to," Adams confesses in "Outbound Train," a song of departure, abandonment and painful hindsight realizations, themes that continue within the regretful "Broken Anyway."
The sparse, despondent penultimate track upon "Prisoner" is the Springsteen-esque sorrow of "Tightrope," on which our narrator wishes solely for his former lover to make him smile once again but as he explains to us, "Flip on the tube, we watch it 'til we sleep/Ain't nothing but static and the panic and and the feeling manic."
"We Disappear" is the album's shimmering, shattering conclusion, a song that echoes and reverberates through vocals and guitars that phase into ghostly ether, just like the love once shared with turbulent feelings of resentment, resignation, recrimination and again, haunting regret
remain. To my ears, the song feels like the most overtly confessional as Adams unearths one wounded, hurtful realization after another.
At the song's opening, Adams proclaims, "If I was born to be the loner, okay/But I'm not made of stone/And I'm so blown away/Don't know what's the rubble/And the parts I want to save." Soon thereafter, he expresses, "Was I alone? Am I still?/Nobody gets in, nobody ever will/You deserve a future and you know I'll never change." And even further still, he reveals, "Wish I could explain but it hurts to breathe/Didn't fit in my chest so I wore it on my sleeve." All the while, the song repeats the refrain "We disappear, we fade away," a statement that makes me return all the way to the very beginning on this posting because once the concept of "we" ceases to be, then what happens to "me"?
Ryan Adams' "Prisoner" is a beautifully sad collection of rock and roll torch songs that serves as a complete song cycle of heartache and woe, much like Beck's "Sea Change" (released September 24, 2002), for instance. Yet, and in keeping with the idea of a musical trilogy as set forth by Stereogum, "Prisoner" is also an album that truly does inform both "Ryan Adams" and "1989," making those releases works to revisit with new ears.
In some ways, and even while we will never truly know for certain, I am now wondering if this approach may have been Adams' intent and his additional releases of his punk rock tribute "1984" (released August 28, 2014) as well as the subsequent glut of 7"/digital singles were somewhat designed to throw us off of the scent so to speak, as the sheer amount of material might have kept us occupied enough to not look too closely. For, If "Ryan Adams" was kind of designed to function as a bit of a re-introduction and re-commitment to recording after his self-imposed sabbatical after the breakup of his band the Cardinals, we may not have even considered that he was possibly addressing or dealing with the issues of his then marriage, his refusal to speak publicly about it notwithstanding.
Furthermore, with "1989," we did know that Taylor Swift's original album was one of solace for Adams after his divorce. Yet to record a full end-to-end cover version of the album and then release it to the world as well, may have been another way for him to covertly communicate with his audience, even though he was using the means of another figure's work.
While he may have done some amount of concealing himself with aspects of his recent musical output, with "Prisoner," Ryan Adams sounds unusually exposed and in doing so, he has grown even taller artistically. His musical and lyrical language throughout the album is deceptively simple, and also clean, clear, poignantly direct. He showcases an economy of music and words that ultimately reveal a world of emotion, a tactic which, to me, signifies Adams' continued growth as a songwriter, singer, musician and producer, areas in which he has long excelled but this time around, he has clearly performed some serious self-examination regarding his own musical education and how he wishes to present his music.
Again, he has amazed me. To think, Ryan Adams, even with some of his genre shape shifting, has really remained grounded within the traditional rock and roll musical set-up of guitar-bass-drums with some additional element here and there and he has never really functioned as a studio wizard, so to speak, turning the music inside out to create different sonic universes. That has never been his style. What he does accomplish, and what is exhibited upon "Prisoner" so beautifully is knowing that the song itself is the star, and with that in mind, Adams precisely and exactly recorded only what each song needed to be represented at its finest. No more, no less. And everything is indeed in its right place.
In keeping with the possibility of this album being ore revealing than the previous two albums may lie in the overall instrumentation. On both "Ryan Adams" and "1989," he has collaborated with a full band. Yet on "Prisoner," and aside from "Do You Still Love Me?," the album is essentially the work of Adams alone in studio with only drummer Johnny T. Yerington as a collaborator, making the work feel more unfiltered.
The emotions of Ryan Adams' "Prisoner" resonate greater with each listen, its core of romantic ache and loss becoming more deeply felt. Yet, this is not a depressing album by any means. In many ways, these are sad songs meant for communication and connection, taking the personal and making the intimate completely universal in its commonality of our experiences with the peaks and valleys of love with another, and our individualized transformations throughout.
Ryan Adams' "Prisoner" is an urgent work of sustained passions and moods that has already earned a spot as one of my favorite albums of 2017.
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