MUSIC TO MY EARS: Ryan Adams' Healing 'Heartbreaker' 
by Timothy White (from Billboard Online) 

If we're not afraid to submit to their dark power, the best sad songs can make us stronger. About eight weeks
ago Whiskeytown singer/songwriter Ryan Adams quietly released "Heartbreaker" (Bloodshot Records), his first
solo album. Feeling so bad has seldom sounded so laceratingly good, and just to make sure you don't miss 
anything on the finest musical memoir of 2000, it's better to listen to it in the dark. 

"Sometimes when you get that lonely or that lost or that sad," says Adams of the project, "you really operate
outof the worst of your fears and the highest of your hopes at the same time. I think that spiritually you owe it to
yourself when youhave intense feelings to respect those feelings and go, 'OK, this is as much of the gift of being
here as a walk through the park.' Hurtdoesn't have to be a bad thing. If they feel it, it's important for people to
experience every angle of love." 

"Heartbreaker" boasts shambling rock and restive ballads and abject waltz-tempo testimony, and it's that truly
inspired album everybody's been seeking from a young male troubadour for the past decade or more. But at its
center is a raw stillness, dense as a cloak, that enshrouds like a night on the coastal North Carolina plains where
Adams was reared. Those acquainted with that corner of the South know it gets swallowed, after the evening
sun exits, by a wild, elemental quiet that seems impossible to penetrate, asif one could drive for hours at high
speed and never reach the damned end of it. 

"It would hit nighttime, and there's justabsolutely nothing there," recalls Adams (born Nov. 5, 1974, to building
contractor Robert Adams and educator Susan Dedmond) regarding an adolescence spent in  Jacksonville, N.C.,
and nearby beach towns like Swansboro. "It's bleak and can be extraordinarily beautiful, but it's very remote and
slow. There's lots of pine trees, and it's flat because it's below sea level, and it can make you crazy with this total
sense of calm  outside‹but at the same time this sense of urgency, like you're just lost in the whole world. I think
it turns a lot of people there to  drink. There have been times when I've actually needed to go back to  that feeling
of calm there. Then it'd wear off real fast, and I'd run like hell." 

When Adams was 15, he ran first to Raleigh, N.C., the state capital and the hub of a liberal and college-oriented
community of the New South. A 10th-grade dropout with a general equivalency diploma, a head full of Ernest
Hemingway and Allen Ginsberg, and a guitar, he  fronted a punk band called Patty Duke Syndrome. As a
late-teen  romance unraveled, he discovered the melancholy music of George Jones  and his rock stepson Gram
Parsons. In 1994, exactly six years ago  this month, Adams founded a certain woolly-brilliant band called 
Whiskeytown, whose three albums ("Faithless Street" [Mood  Food], "Stranger's Almanac" [Outpost], and
"Pneumonia" [unreleased])   and assorted EPs and singles contained some of the finest, 200- proof/no chaser
indie rock of the era. 

In 1998, Adams relocated to New York, fell in love with a woman named  Amy, leased an apartment on Avenue A
between 9th and 10th streets,  and then returned to North Carolina two years later with a broken  heart and a
braced artistic will. "I had had enough of New York,"  Adams reflects. "My lease was running out, I had a
relationship on  the rocks, I was having some record company problems, I'd taken some  serious blows that year,
and I just needed to escape. I was afraid,  but I knew if I gave into any of that fear I would just crumble into 
pieces." A new manager who accepted Adams on a probational basis ("He  wanted to see if I was gonna fall
apart") suggested he move to Nashville to save money and expand his musical/social circle. 

The outcome is "Heartbreaker," an intuitive document destined to be a prized, restorative possession for anyone
fortunate enough to encounter it. The record's 14 songs are so naturally, numbingly magnetic, they knot the
hands of the clock and make you late for whatever seemed most important before the music started. In fact, 
that's how many of the songs got written, like the longing- obsessed "Oh My Sweet Carolina" (a duet with
Emmylou Harris), which  Adams banged out on a typewriter near theclose of his ill-fated stay  on Avenue A.
"My Winding Wheel" was devised on guitar in the passenger seat of a U-Haul truck as Adams and a buddy
were headed to  Adams' new East Nashville address. "We almostgot into a wreck when  we sideswiped another
guy," he explains with a laugh. "When I flinched as I was playing, my finger jumped a fret‹that's how I  found
that suspended chord in the song! 

"The rest of the record," Adams continues, "got written hanging out   at [musician/singers] Gillian [Welch] and
Dave [Rawlings'] house"‹a crowning stroke being the cut "To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)"‹" or at
my house, or a couple of them in the [Woodland]  Studios, five minutes from my house. I wrote 'Damn, Sam (I
Love A Woman That Rains)' 31/2 minutes before I recorded it. That's why you hear that noise at the beginning
of the tape as [producer] Ethan  [Johns] rushed to press 'record.' " Among the other emotionally conflicted
classics on "Heartbreaker" is "Come Pick Me Up," a gently strained appeal, backed by Kim Richey's harmonies,
from "a guy in a  bar, very lonely or wanton" and eager to go home with a ravishing Miss Wrong. The "sweetly
humorous" chorus: "Come pick me up/Take me out/Fuck me up/Steal my records/Screw all myfriends‹they're all
full of shit/With a smile on your face/And then do it again/ I wish you would." 

After 14 days of recording, "Heartbreaker" was done. "I can't imagine  the difference in how I feel now," says
Adams with bashful relief. "I kinda woke up, opened my ears‹or maybe I closed them‹and felt more."  And he
wants to get on with his life and career‹but also to let  loyal Whiskeytown fans know that the unissued
"Pneumonia" ("a big, old  double-album swan song") will finally reachstores early in 2001. 

"One of the things I'm trying to do is pay less attention to the  things that work against me and be more forgiving
and understanding and more appreciative," muses Adams as he approaches his 26th  birthday. "That's what's
really worked for the best."