Ryan Adams

Yeah, I agree! Only one I could think of to recommend was Matthew Ryan's Concussion (weirdly not streaming anywhere but mostly on YouTube).

vg i agree with you about news’s metabolic cycle. it’s exhausting

a good Ryan Adams-ish "whiskey-soaked emotionally resonant artist" to recommend to people is Ruston Kelly, whose DYING STAR was one of the best 5 to 10 albums of 2018, imo. he sounds quite a bit like RA in some places. (he is also married to Kacey Musgraves, as many know, but not everyone certainly.)

you can non-Spotify stream the whole album here: https://www.stereogum.com/2011971/ruston-kelly-dying-star/music/album-stream/

I mean i don't wish to equate being an abuser with being a Tory, the point I was getting at is that for a lot of issues and a lot of fandom the lines are ambiguous. I wouldn't judge anyone for holding on to the music that means a lot to them in the aftermath of someone being a reprehensible monster. It's not like people got into Ryan Adams because he was a beast or Brand New because the guy was a paedo - the significance that music has played in your life doesn't suddenly become invalid because the person turned out to be an utter failure of a human. I've been very lucky as a fan - nobody I've adored has ever really let me down in such a major and abhorrent way as this - but I wouldn't be able to say I could easily erase my tastes if someone important to me did.

I mean this man is scum clearly but he must have meant something to a lot of people for it to be a big deal and much as i wouldn't want to se him supported anew with people spending money on releases and shows, I would understand the mental hoops people would jump through to justify not throwing away his catalogue from their collection.

And I'm glad all his sponsors etc are dropping him too because it's good to see parts of the industry take this stuff seriously, unlike Chris Brown who continues to get away with it again and again

This conversation is always weird. I don’t think people who are just jerks or maybe conservatives should get mixed up with people who are abusers.

And boxedjoy: you are so otm. Sorry if I offended anyone in how to deal with this. :-(

Liz Phair and Karen Elson weigh in:

https://pitchfork.com/news/liz-phair-and-karen-elson-share-statements-about-ryan-adams-amid-abuse-allegations/

Phair: "If I do, I’ll write about it. But I think you can extrapolate. My experience was nowhere near as personally involving, but yes the record ended and the similarities are upsetting."

hey so pic.twitter.com/P911Dvnfq3

— millennial falcon (@phoebe_bridgers) February 17, 2019

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I'll never regret quitting music journalism, because almost every musician I interviewed was an asshole or a clown, or an asshole pretending to be a clown. (Exceptions, obviously - but not many.)

― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, February 16, 2019 8:33 AM (yesterday)

My small involvement with the music industry in my late teens/early 20s showed me that you constantly have to navigate lots of terrible people who wield power in all sorts of supremely fucked up ways. It made me realize that I never wanted to pursue music as a profession ever again.

This was my anecdotal observation whilst hanging around indie rock dudes. In other, non-rock, styles of music, my data supports the conclusion that, while you certainly can and will encounter such types, it is nowhere near as obligatory.

This x1000. Jazz has its problems, but the real pieces of shit are much fewer and further between.

Albums you own or used to own from artists that turned out to be awful people.

There was some similar discussion on here about art vs artist and on the xxxtentacion thread.

and many other threads

Tied in with the Ryan Adams business a little bit, Lydia Loveless and her issues w/Adams’ old label Bloodshot:

Thread for Lydia Loveless, Country-Rock Lady I Enjoy

Most musicians are OK, it's the people around then who tend to be terrible. IME.

This x1000. Jazz has its problems, but the real pieces of shit are much fewer and further between.

are we talking all jazz musicians or just the "famous" ones ... I mean, if we're talking about a less remunerative and popular genre, it is likely to attract fewer pieces of shit, because there are fewer opportunities for a payoff idk

it's almost like saying, it's really amazing how many rapey, misogynistic, all-around awful men there are in politics vs. say, pension fund management?

Let's not blame an industry or a culture for the reprehensible behaviour of shitty shitty men

Not quite the same. In fact, lots of jazz players can eke out a modest living between gigging and teaching.
(xp)

Can't we blame all of the above?

xp

i'm quite familiar with the specifics and details of those modest livings tbh

though they make less than your average pension fund manager

and on the flipside there is also this:
http://wearewijo.org/about/about-us/

Yeah, there definitely is a problem there, don’t want to seem to be making light of it. Still going to more leery of the random average (indie) rock dude I might meet versus the rank and file jazz musician.

Can't we blame all of the above?

xp

https://pitchfork.com/news/mandy-moore-opens-up-about-ryan-adams-relationship-on-wtf-listen/

Consequence of a Sound covered my music before other people did. They wrote about me often, and super generously. I also remember Ryan bragging about how he got them to delete part of an interview I did with them where I called him an asshole after it had already been published. https://t.co/hWhk1CQLQq

— millennial falcon (@phoebe_bridgers) February 21, 2019

The last La Sera album's blandness - curious how much of that was due to Ryan Adams as producer and how much was due to Goodman giving her husband a larger role. The prior album had a great vibe that I was surprised she abandoned.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ryan-adams-abuse-me-too-songs-lyrics-796686/amp/

”You’ve got that good girl faith thing, ass so tight,” he sang, sexualizing Swift’s provocation and subbing “ass” for “skirt.” (At the time of the song’s release, listeners debated whether or not Adams sang the word “ass” or “it’s, and it remains unclear to many.)
“We should have known,” my coworker remarked.

Is this a parody?

Having read about Adams' past actions in that NY scene book I recently finished, the whole Taylor Swift cover album project takes on a different tone -- although if I'd listened to it, I guess it may have been evident. My assumption was that he was an indie type who thought it'd be amusing, if misguided, to cover some pop music he genuinely appreciated.

After reading about what an abusive dickhead he is and how he devalued the pop music of his ex-wife, and my extension, her worth as a person... I'd guess that he'd previously paid some attention to Swift as a songwriter that was previously, if not in the same space as him, working in a parallel space more on the pop end of the spectrum and the cover album project was an attention-seeking move taken completely out of spite

what a shithead

xp yeah I'm all for burning RA at the stake but couldn't this sort of unpacking be retrospectively applied to the work of pretty much every male or female songwriter in any genre since the dawn of time?

"Ryan Adams’ Behavior Was Hiding in Plain Sight in His Songs"

i FUCKING HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE DO THIS

“We should have known,” my coworker remarked.

ugh

I'm on record up in this thread somewhere strongly agreeing with that ugh

great minds ugh alike

"Ryan Adams’ Behavior Was Hiding in Plain Sight in His Songs"

i FUCKING HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE DO THIS

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Thursday, February 21, 2019 3:24 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is fucking dumb, almost as dumb when courts use rap lyrics as evidence.

looks like johnny cash once shot a man in reno just to watch him die. cancelled!

Yeah, you could play Mad Libs with that RS piece and substitute Ryan Adams' song titles and lyrics with pretty much anyone else's, and the same monstrous picture emerges. (I am not suggesting we do this btw)

was just thinking that I’ll still kinda stan for “stray cat blues” and wondering how I feel about that

this may not be the thread for it but in the wake of all of this I've seen a lot of "we stan our pop queen who made 'candy,' a real song"-type comments. these are obviously well-meaning but to me always come off strange, and in this case especially strange considering mandy moore very publicly offered fans a refund (and actually refunded at least a couple of people) for her first album. this was before she met ryan adams (which was around 2008, I gather) but I'd be surprised, given what she's said on record about belittling her for "not being a real musician," if that wasn't the sort of latent insecurity he picked up on.

(a weird parallel would be kesha's records, where her old stuff she hates was also the dr. luke stuff, and her mature acoustic career turn was the public break from him, rather that vice versa. and the general current of support for her is "wow, 'Praying' is so much more real." stories like this do weird things to authenticity politics)

also xp -- you can't take a record and extrapolate about the artist being/not being an abusive person (well, you can -- gut feelings certainly can and do -- but you invite false positives.) you also can't argue the converse, i.e. where "X abusive artist made Y record, therefore all records like Y are by abusive artists like X."

but -- and I may be in the minority on this -- once the artist has been revealed as an abusive person, you absolutely can assume their work might reflect that. it doesn't have to, but there's a good chance, unless the artist is so perfect at compartmentalizing that none of their beliefs ever seep into their work, and also so strictly private that none of their work is autobiographical. considering carl newman is on record calling "harder now that it's over" autobiographical, the latter at least is not the case. (I kind of suspect at least a few "my work isn't autobiographical" comments are an attempt to mask times when it is.)

like, for instance, you absolutely can say "woody allen is a bad person with bad underlying beliefs about women, which come out in his movies constantly." this would seem fairly uncontroversial (except among woody allen defenders, obviously) at this point!

ok but my point is i really hate the framing “we should’ve known this entire time bc of the lyrics!!!

people did this with jesse lacey at the time too and his lyrics are much worse in terms of reflecting his abuses and i was mad about it then too bc people were all about emphasizing this secret knowledge that could’ve been obtained through the lyrics that were so OBVIOUSLY from the perspective of an abuser

idk maybe i am the only person who finds this fundamentally obnoxious

I baseline presume that lyrics/books/etc are not autobiographical. I'm constantly let down in this regard. For example, I was caught off completely off-guard when David Foster Wallace turned out to be a depressed tennis player with addiction problems. But that's how I want art to be, ideally - an invention, a creation, something well-thought out that speaks to the listener, not about the author.

maybe people's imaginative powers aren't actually that great.