Ryan Adams - 29
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Ryan AdamsEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2005-12-20
Music Label: Lost Highway
Soundtracks:
- 29
- Strawberry Wine
- Nightbirds
- Blue Sky Blues
- Carolina Rain
- Starlite Diner
- The Sadness
- Elizabeth, You Were Born To Play That Part
- Voices
Free Music Notes for 29
Free Music Review: "Don't spend too much time on the other side, let the daylight in"
Hit: 4 Stars
The backstory behind 29 is that Ryan Adams had to shelve it for a while - it did, after all, come out when he was 31, his final of three albums released in 2005. Strategically it makes sense - 29, unique in Adams' catalog anyway, definitely didn't fit with his more direct, pop-oriented songs of Gold and Love Is Hell, and had at least a comrade of sorts in the countrified drunkenness of Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, Adams' other 2005 releases. It was deemed too weird and obscure, but as the bass drum beats and guitar blazes a sound right out of the Grateful Dead's "Truckin" on the title track, it's something else - a declaration of survival. In the track, Adams muses "I should've died 100,000 times" and "Most of my friends are married and making them babies/ To most of them I've already died." He recounts bar fights, arrests, close calls, drug use, and even his dead dog's pile of bones and then roars on his way - it's obscure enough, I suppose, but it's also a thrill. Coupled with its following song, "Strawberry Wine," which has a softer Adams musing "Don't spend too much time on the other side/ let the daylight in," Adams imagines the side of his 29 years if he hadn't survived, and that makes this, really, a concept from start to finish about the luck of the surviving - even a manual of sorts.
Adams has long been criticized as being a machine that cranks out songs rather than an album artist, but 29 is the antithesis - a full record not that concerned with the song to song individuality. That's the strongest thing about 29, but it also isn't fulfilled. Though its middle, sad songs "Night Birds" and "Blue Sky Blues" are terrific, they're left unfulfilled by what should be the conceptual meat of the record - a bla love song "Starlite Diner," and "The Sadness," a fight with depression re-imagined as a bullfight. The truth is neither of the songs work, and they disrupt Adams' conceptual daring. Though the record picks back up with "Elizabeth, You Were Born To Play That Part," as emotional a song as Adams has ever written with its collision of two absolutely gorgeous melodies. However, the heartbreak seems isolated. "Voices" concludes the record, and it's like a postmodern folk song - all deadly pleas and emotional coos so trenchant you barely notice there's only an acoustic guitar playing. This song should connect 29's ends of survival - with its "Don't you listen to the voices" center, it's the hope that makes his good luck story of "29" possible - but it doesn't, it merely ends the album respectably. I love 29 for its host of great songs and its ambition, even for its weirdness and obscurity, but it's clearly not fully realized by its end.
29 Poster
On his third release of a most prolific year, Ryan Adams takes a break from his band, the Cardinals, to fashion an introspective song cycle with stripped-down arrangements focused on acoustic guitar or solo piano. After the propulsive, self-mythologizing title track opens the album in brazen fashion, forging an unlikely bond of comparison between John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band and the early '70s Grateful Dead, much of the rest of 29 finds Adams at his dreamiest (the reveries of "Strawberry Wine" and "Elizabeth, You Were Born to Play That Part") and most rapturously romantic (the aching falsetto on the lovesick "Starlite Diner"). He continues to take chances and not all of them pay off, with the underwatery echo of "Night Birds" and the over-the-top dramatics of "The Sadness" showing the downside of self-indulgence, though "Carolina Rain" suggests he can return to the alt-country prime of Whiskeytown whenever the mood strikes. With the intimacy of the closing "Voices," Adams sounds less like he is singing a song than sharing a secret. Refusing to rein himself in or pin himself down, he sings on the title track, "You can't hang on to something that won't stop moving." --Don McLeeseRecommended Ryan Adams Discography
 Heartbreaker |  Gold |  Love Is Hell |
 Whiskeytown, Pneumonia |  Whiskeytown, Stranger's Almanac |  Whiskeytown, Faithless Street |
Japanese pressing of 29, Ryan's third and final album for 2005. 29 is a solo album of all new and original material. 9 tracks. Universal. 2005.
Japanese Edition of the Third Album in 2005 from the Prolific Singer/Songwriter.
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