Raleigh News & Observer
July 22, 2007
Ryan Adams is frequently compared to Gram Parsons, the Rolling Stones and other classic-rock types. But a better reference point might be Madonna. Sure, troubadour Adams and dance-diva Madonna don't sound anything like each other (and Madonna has sold multiples more albums over the years). Yet they both play the media as skillfully as a virtuoso violinist, generating headlines that can be as interesting as their music.
Ryan Adams, seen performing last year in England, has dipped into his own catalog for his 'Easy Tiger' album.
Since his solo career officially began at the turn of this century, Raleigh expatriate Adams has had three distinct peaks. The first happened with his 2001 breakthrough album "Gold," which earned Grammy nominations and launched Adams into the rock-celebrity jet stream. The second came in 2005, when the nation's iPod owners spent untold hours editing down the three albums Adams released that year into a manageable set of songs. And the third is going on right now with Adams' ninth solo album, "Easy Tiger" (Lost Highway Records).
The "Easy Tiger" buildup began in May, when novelist Stephen King posted a glowing testimonial on amazon.com, favorably comparing Adams to Neil Young. It picked up steam in June with a remarkable New York Times profile recounting Adams' history of substance abuse (which has reputedly ended) under the headline, "Ryan Adams Didn't Die." And it reached a crescendo with rapturous reviews for "Easy Tiger," which debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 this month -- Adams' first top-10 hit.
"Easy Tiger" is easy enough to like, playing to Adams' strengths while showing off the country-rock voices and styles that suit him best. Of course, he can't resist a few indulgences, especially "Oh My God, Whatever, Etc." (as annoyingly underwritten as the title suggests) and the ragged-but-all-wrong rocker "Halloweenhead." Still, with 13 tracks clocking in at less than 39 minutes, plus a half-dozen songs you'll be humming afterward, "Easy Tiger" stands as Adams' most accessible and focused album to date.
But the most interesting thing about "Easy Tiger" has gone largely unmentioned. The album has a couple of older songs from Adams' catalog, "Off Broadway" and "These Girls" -- which is curious, given the prodigious quantities of songs he writes. Even more curious, "These Girls" is about the last song you'd expect Adams to exhume, given its history.
A wounded yelp
"These Girls" used to be called "Hey There Mrs. Lovely," and it dates to 1999. I first heard Adams play it in October of that year at Chapel Hill's Local 506, which is still one of the most remarkable live performances I've ever witnessed.
Armed with only an acoustic guitar, Adams played a set of songs so new he had to read the lyrics out of the notebook. Usually, that would turn an audience into a chattery, inattentive mass. Instead, the crowd stayed pin-drop silent while he played, and they cheered thunderously afterward. New or not, the songs were just that good.
The cheers were especially loud for "Hey There Mrs. Lovely," even though Adams introduced it as "a new song that I wrote that I absolutely [expletive] hate." But that didn't stop people from loving "Mrs. Lovely." A few dates into Adams' solo tour that fall, people who had heard the song from bootleg recordings going around the Internet were yelling for it at shows.
"'Hey There Mrs. Lovely' was one of the more popular requests that tour," says Van Alston, Adams' tour manager at the time. "But I would say its popularity is one that grew with repeated listenings at home rather than one of those knock-your-socks-off moments at a live show. It was a little too long and subtle for that."
In its original incarnation, "Hey There Mrs. Lovely" was rooted in a dying romance with a specific person. Adams sang it in a wounded yelp, mourning a doomed relationship he felt powerless to either save or end. He sang in a key of utter hopelessness:
Hey there, Mrs. Lovely, are you coming out to play?
I've been stranded on your doorstep every night and day.
And I want you so bad.
But when you cry I get scared.
Wanna dry your eyes with cinnamon and pears.
By the final chorus, he added a third eye-drying mechanism, "pills." It's not the most elegant song he's ever written, but the combination of beautifully lilting guitar and Adams' quavering voice was enormously powerful. No wonder he claimed to hate it -- "Hey There Mrs. Lovely" is as vulnerably sincere as Adams has ever sounded.
Considering his professed disdain, it's not surprising that "Mrs. Lovely" didn't last too long in his rotation. Adams did record it in 2000 for an album called "Destroyer," which joined a long list of the unreleased music Adams has in the vaults. Until recently, it seemed most likely to surface on his upcoming box set of outtakes (due out next year).
New and not improved
But for reasons known only to Adams himself, he revived and retitled it "These Girls" on "Easy Tiger," with the same arrangement and rewritten lyrics. I have yet to find an explanation, and Adams did not respond to an interview request for this story.
In contrast to the original version's raw emotion, Adams sings "These Girls" in a weary, seen-it-all, just-short-of-lazy croon. While the opening verse seems to be about someone very much like the original song's subject, the chorus mutates "These Girls" into a jaded ode to the sort of groupies a critically acclaimed rock star might encounter:
The late-night girls are anxious and they're coming out to play.
And I've been stranded on their doorstep for every night and day.
I only want them more, it's so sad.
But when they smile, God I've been had.
I get hypnotized and I wanna go to bed.
Wish I could say this is an improvement, but it's not. The rap on Adams has always been that he writes so many songs because he never actually finishes anything. The mutation of "Hey There Mrs. Lovely" into "These Girls" suggests that Adams might agree. Except I hope he doesn't think it's finished now.
Staff writer David Menconi can be reached at 829-4759, blogs.newsobserver.com/beat or david.menconi@newsobserver.com.
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