8. Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker
I tried living alone once, in a town where I knew no one, and had three months of hot, dry, windy summer to kill. Actually, I was supposed to be working, but in a college town that is a quarter of its normal size when the university is out of session, jobs are not too forthcoming. Well, I spent my days in a tiny studio apartment, waiting for the phone to ring and trying not to think about what I might have left behind in Idaho. Depressing, eh. A bit I suppose, but I had my guitar, a pile of books to read, and a very cool CD store a few blocks away called Rodeo Records. Ellensburg, Washington is just a short, beautiful drive over the Cascades from Seattle, but it felt like nowhere that summer. A few weeks before I was to start graduate school, I wandered in to Rodeo Records and bought two albums on a whim: Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker and Laura Veirs' The Triumphs and Travails of Orphan Mae. While Laura Veirs has had more staying power with me, it was Heartbreaker that made all of the drudgery of that summer worth something.
The first time I listened to Heartbreaker, I got so emotional that I drank all of the beer in my apartment and had to climb the hill up to the store for more. It was as if Ryan Adams had peered into my soul and wrote heartachingly poignant poetry about what he saw. Not the way of it I guess, but it was so refreshing to know that someone else was fighting the same demons that I was. He had the written the words I had been unsuccessfully trying to express for years. "Come Pick Me Up" quickly worked its way on to my "all-time best lyrics" list (a project for later). It reminded me of a few songs I had written a couple of years back, only about a million times better. It was all too much. Every night for a week, I sat at my kitchen table with Heartbreaker on repeat and stared out window. Then, the phone did ring. And everything changed in a flash. But that is a story just for me and the person who was on the other end of the line.
I guess that Heartbreaker is one of those albums that can take me back to a very precise moment in time, to a very specific set of emotions. And sometimes I need to recall that dreariness, to remind myself of how incredible it felt when it all melted away.
I tried living alone once, in a town where I knew no one, and had three months of hot, dry, windy summer to kill. Actually, I was supposed to be working, but in a college town that is a quarter of its normal size when the university is out of session, jobs are not too forthcoming. Well, I spent my days in a tiny studio apartment, waiting for the phone to ring and trying not to think about what I might have left behind in Idaho. Depressing, eh. A bit I suppose, but I had my guitar, a pile of books to read, and a very cool CD store a few blocks away called Rodeo Records. Ellensburg, Washington is just a short, beautiful drive over the Cascades from Seattle, but it felt like nowhere that summer. A few weeks before I was to start graduate school, I wandered in to Rodeo Records and bought two albums on a whim: Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker and Laura Veirs' The Triumphs and Travails of Orphan Mae. While Laura Veirs has had more staying power with me, it was Heartbreaker that made all of the drudgery of that summer worth something.
The first time I listened to Heartbreaker, I got so emotional that I drank all of the beer in my apartment and had to climb the hill up to the store for more. It was as if Ryan Adams had peered into my soul and wrote heartachingly poignant poetry about what he saw. Not the way of it I guess, but it was so refreshing to know that someone else was fighting the same demons that I was. He had the written the words I had been unsuccessfully trying to express for years. "Come Pick Me Up" quickly worked its way on to my "all-time best lyrics" list (a project for later). It reminded me of a few songs I had written a couple of years back, only about a million times better. It was all too much. Every night for a week, I sat at my kitchen table with Heartbreaker on repeat and stared out window. Then, the phone did ring. And everything changed in a flash. But that is a story just for me and the person who was on the other end of the line.
I guess that Heartbreaker is one of those albums that can take me back to a very precise moment in time, to a very specific set of emotions. And sometimes I need to recall that dreariness, to remind myself of how incredible it felt when it all melted away.
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