| Warp + Weft: Ryan Adams :: "Cannonball Days" |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 01:20 PM | |
 Ryan Adams"Cannonball Days" Gold Universal 2001 Back in 2001, when singer/songwriter Ryan Adams released his second solo album, Gold, my then-girlfriend fell in love with "Cannonball Days." The track appeared on the bonus disc that came with the limited edition of the album and, like most of Ryan Adams' best and worst moments, it has a tantalizingly unfinished feel. His star was ascendant in the fall of 2001, buoyed by the success of single "New York, New York," plaudits from Elton John, and critical acclaim for his first solo disc, Heartbreaker. But he was already beginning to manifest his most frustrating tendency: Leaving songs half-finished, no matter how good or bad. The bad ones meandered on interminably through a lack of focus, amidst threats that he would be releasing albums at a Prince-like pace of three a year. But the good ones made you wish he could release just one really great one every other year and learn to edit himself. But on the other hand, it's clear that strict editing would have kept "Cannonball Days" in the dark altogether, since it was excluded from the album proper. The instrumentation is spare—just a couple acoustic guitars and a vintage organ—but here it lets the story breathe, rather than leaving it underdeveloped. Like most of Adams' best songs, it's a break-up song, but at the time, the two things that I really liked about it were the odd length of the organ solo (six bars—at least two less than you'd expect) and the kind of eerie way he sang about dancing in apartment "A-9" when my girlfriend and I had just moved out of a building where we'd lived in apartment #9. My girlfriend, though, loved the broken-down, kind of ragged glory of the song. It certainly has a baroque and decaying feeling to it, revolving around a chorus that goes, "Loved you back then, / but I couldn't say when. / All of your roses have died." Gold was also Adams' New York album, and she liked to willfully mishear a line about a "West Jersey queen with a rattle machine" as "Westchester queen," to reflect her own hometown. Stream "Cannonball Days" below: But again, "Cannonball Days" is a break-up song, and even though we were living apart after living together for two years, my girlfriend and I were fine. Basically. I could appreciate the song as an example of Adams' songcraft at its best—a tune where its sketch-like feel was an asset and not a liability and where his bitter and jaded worldview was tempered by enough romance to make poetry. Did I say bitter and jaded? Let me be more plain about it: Ryan Adams is kind of an asshole. But it's that selfish, egocentric viewpoint that makes his most vicious songs so successful. For my part, I could have never written something as flat-out mean as "Rosalie Come and Go" (also from the Gold bonus disc) or "Come Pick Me Up" from Heartbreaker. So I appreciated that about him, even as more spotty releases like Demolition and Rock N Roll followed over the next couple years. To be honest, Adams' music and I just kind of grew apart; my interest in alt.country had briefly coincided with Adams' own, and as he grew into more of a heartland rocker, I became more interested in the minimalist rock of Spoon. I kind of forgot about Ryan Adams until well after my girlfriend and I had broken up and I had moved to Minnesota. It all started to come full circle in the spring of 2004 when, after months of moping through Death Cab for Cutie records and using their songs to frame my own situation as wronged, unfair, inevitable, or simply sad, I remembered "Cannonball Days." She had loved that song, and I hadn't heard it in a couple of years, but when I went to find it—nothing. I had the jewel case for Gold, but the discs were gone. I had little doubt that I had lost it in what I had taken to calling "the divorce," and with symbolism that was too compelling to reject, I knew I had to find this song and repossess it for myself. And so the quest began: iTunes—nothing; Limewire—zip; Amazon—nada. My growing desperation was largely a matter of timing; now you can get the limited edition of Gold used on Amazon, but at the time the whole sellers' marketplace thing hadn't really taken hold. I started asking around before finally talking to singer/songwriter Martin Devaney, who was quite the Ryan Adams fan at the time. He had the limited edition of Gold, but when he went to get it for me, his bonus disc was missing. His friend Kevin Hunt had it, and Kevin was pretty sure it was in his car. Except when I went to meet Martin and Kevin at Martin's parents' house to grab the disc, it wasn't in the car. Maybe it was at his apartment. So I drove Kevin over to his place and stood by while he rummaged through his CD collection. What was I doing? Honestly, I just had nothing better to do. Turned loose by the end of the semester at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, I was free to pursue my forensic examination of the end of that long-term relationship with renewed vigor. Music, which had started for me as a hobby and grown into first an obsession and then a career, had grown now into a kind of divining rod—a way for me to delve what lay within. Listening to "Blacking Out the Friction" by Death Cab for Cutie was like fastening a spigot somewhere, and events that had unfolded without any structure or logic I could see were given form and sense, spilling out in some way that I could grasp, rather than remaining bottled up and formless. When Joe Pernice sang, "Sometimes it's better not to know / Holding onto something when you should just let go" in "Baby in Two," he was doing more than simply echoing my own thoughts; "Baby in Two" and the rest of The Pernice Brothers' Yours, Mine and Ours was teaching me how to be the broken-up me and, ultimately, crystallizing my sorrow, anger, and confusion so I could eventually move past it. I looked at "Cannonball Days" as just another piece of the puzzle, but as I stood in Kevin's unfamiliar apartment as he tried to track the wrong CDs through the wrong cases, I didn't know which piece it was, or what it was going to prove to me if I could just hear this song again. He never did find it in the apartment, but amazingly, one more search through his van turned it up in a forgotten CD wallet jammed in the pocket behind the driver's seat. My joy knew no bounds, despite the fact that I was basically planning on using the song to beat myself up once again. I jumped in my car and slid the disc into the changer. The acoustic guitars once again blossomed to life, thrumming through my car speakers as I pointed myself towards South Minneapolis and home. It suddenly seemed to me that while there may be merit in critical appraisal of music by some kind of yardstick of artistic achievement that balances personal bias with a deep knowledge of a broad range of music and a keen aesthetic sense, such judgments in the absence of emotional crisis are a bit like judging the usefulness of a fire extinguisher without the urgent need for one. I began to sing along, stumbling over words I couldn't quite remember from the last time I heard the song, as the song's mix of bitterness and resolve started catalyzing inside me. As the images of a carefree, reckless, and romantic past ("A woman so fine / Fine as a girl / and slow like an Italian wine"; "I tasted your lips / with my hands on your hips ... Tasted the salt through your skin") fought with the recurring chorus of dead roses, I stopped singing and started shouting. The song was growing into an affirmation—a confirmation that something can be beautiful and then die, totally and completely, and it doesn't have to be your fault. I had already worked myself up into a kind of righteous fury by the time Adams got to the third verse, which I had never paid much attention to before. I was paying attention now. "Basked in the heat, down on Christopher Street," sang Adams. My ex had just moved to Christopher Street when we broke up. "Bought you a rose from a bum," he continued. "Left you a note, that I stuffed in your coat. / You laughed and you said it was dumb. / Broke like a stem, and I guess you're with him. / I'm sure that he treats you just fine." On that "fine," Adams noses the melody downward into a nasty note, a perfect musical approximation of a sneer, and that's when I pretty much absolutely lost it. "Bottoms up, cheers: Baby here's to your tears / but all of your roses have died." We often gravitate to music that resonates with our better selves, to music that makes us feel sexier, smarter, cooler, more romantic, funkier, and just generally better than we really are. So much of the music I'd been listening to was a consolation—a sort of "there, there, everything will be all right but it's OK to feel bad right now" kind of balm on my wounded sense of self. But "Cannonball Days" was letting me be something I wasn't—an asshole. Ryan Adams was helping me give a big middle finger to all the bullshit I'd been through over the past year. Even if it was just for three minutes and twenty-five seconds, I could forget about the gray areas and the shared blame and my self-doubt and just feel righteously and well and truly fucked over. That night, driving down 35W toward the apartment I'd just moved into, I could be somebody I wasn't, and I could move a little further past this. |
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| Last Updated: Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 01:21 PM |
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