Ryan Adams & Sincerity

The AV Club blog has an interesting piece by Steve Hyden about his ambivalent attitude to Ryan Adams. I can relate and I'll comment on some of his more provocative points below:

I’m a big fan, and I often can’t stand him, either.

The man is a genius singer/songwriter, but he's always making a jackass out of himself. It's hard to defend his douchebagy actions outside the studio. I suppose anyone who has seen him in concert has a grip. The one concert I saw (at Priest Lake Idaho for the Cold Roses Tour) had incoherent, audience-baiting banter in between songs in which he played an inordinate amount of new material that would later be on Jacksonville Nights and 29. A friend of mine saw him during the Easy Tiger tour and felt short changed by the lack of "any" banter or stagemanship.

A.V. Club contributor Amanda Petrusich summed up this argument in her scathing review of Rock N Roll from Pitchfork: Ultimately, the problem isn't knee-jerk alt-country purists getting pissed about Adams' penchant for electric guitars, or cred-obsessed indie kids hollering about Gap commercials, it's Adams' newfound incapacity (or refusal) to write a song with any acceptable degree of sincerity-- and knowing that he probably could really stings.”

I think artistic license transcends "sincerity"-imagination provides a conduit for expression that belies experience. However, I agree with Hyden when he says:

Call me naïve but Adams’ public persona, to me, seems like the polar opposite of contrived. In fact, Adams is a case study for why contriving a public image is good for an artist. Most artists, whether they like to admit it, put a lot of thought in how they’re perceived by their fanbase. They want the image to fit the music so the two can become interchangeable and feed off each other. Because it’s the art that ultimately matters, not the person that made it. Arcade Fire won’t be doing any photo shoots with Playboy models, for example, because fake tits might undermine the inspirational, chin-stroking power of “Intervention.” This is seen as Arcade Fire acting like Arcade Fire, but it’s really about maintaining a premeditated public perception in a consistent, orderly fashion. Win Butler doesn’t really dress like an Amish farmer in real life, and I’m sure there are days when he doesn’t ponder the future of existence or experience swelling crescendos of uplifting emotion. Some days he might feel like sleeping in, or curling up on the couch with some Cheetos and his Gilmore Girls DVDs. Butler, though, is able to block out the non-Arcade Fire-esque parts of his life from his public persona, which really isn’t that hard to do. (Not blogging about it is a good first step.) But Adams can’t do this. He behaves in public exactly the way he’s feeling that day, which makes him look insincere when he’s actually being completely, utterly, stupidly sincere.

But Adams’ sincerity has nothing to do with his talent. In fact, the two stand in steely opposition. Adams’ unguarded persona has always overshadowed what’s really noteworthy about him: he writes so many damn good songs. As much as Adams himself would hate to be called as much, he is a consummate craftsman. He has what show business people used to call “the knack.” He’s a natural with melody, he sings beautifully, and he can churn out good songs like a one-man Brill Building. He’s more Neil Diamond than Neil Young. If Adams’ realness didn’t always get in the way more people would admire his talent especially since he’s getting better over time.

But I have to disagree with him on this point:

Adams’ growth as a songwriter is re-enforced by the re-release of Strangers Almanac, a late-’90s alt-country touchstone that doesn’t really hold up 10 years later. Because he hadn’t yet developed his craft, Adams was forced to fallback on the down-home, genuine country fella shtick that Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy laid on thick on the early Uncle Tupelo records. (I still cringe whenever I hear that part in “Screen Door” when Tweedy sings “Down here, where we’re at, everyone is eq-ually poor.”) Adams was only 23 when he made Strangers Almanac, and he wasn’t good enough at songwriting yet to make up for his lack of lyrical insight. (Lyrics still are Adams’ weakness.) Only “Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart” and “Dancing With The Women At The Bar” stick, and point the way to the better songs he’d write later on and, hopefully, will continue to write in the future if blogging doesn’t take up too much of his time, or the public’s attention.

"Dancing With The Women At The Bar" doesn't even make my Top 5 songs from, what I think is, a timeless album, Strangers Almanac. "Excuse Me While I Break My Heart" is one of my favorite Whiskytown tracks, the other from this album that are rated 4 stars or higher on my iTunes are: "Losering" (5) / "Waiting To Derail," "Somebody Remembers," "House On The Hill," and "Everything I Do." (4)