Let Down by the Internet: Nobody Told Me That at Some Point Ryan Adams Recorded a Great Album, Never Released, Called Suicide Handbook

Perusing my seemingly endless catalog of music-blogs, I found this interesting list from a new discovery, Rawkblog. The list itself is fun, even if it’s pretentious in places (but what music blog, self included, manages to avoid pretension entirely?). And it’s always nice to find someone whose tastes overlap with yours, but not completely, allowing you to go off and explore some new music. (The musical equivalent of the transitive theory that the friend of a friend is also your friend and the enemy of your friend is your enemy.)

At any rate, aside from generally enjoying music and lists and lists of music especially, I found myself floored at the 9th best album of the 2000s – some album called Suicide Handbook by Ryan Adams. Hold on, I cried. A Ryan Adams album I don’t know about? Never officially released, says Rawkblog? Then how have some people heard it? How is it the #9 album of the entire decade of the 2000s? How did this happen without my knowledge? How did the internet let me down so bad??? Naturally, I commenced Googling at once and managed to track down what I think is a complete copy of this mysterious, unreleased masterpiece by one of my all-time favorite musicians. Of course, I can’t be sure what I have is actually IT, and there are some (occasional) imperfections in the audio, but for the most part the sound is great, and it appears to jibe with all the tracklists I found in my frantic internet searching. I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide how to find this album, or whether it bears finding at all.

The story – as I merely understand it from Wikipedia, let’s be honest – is that Adams delivered the album to his record company on the heels of his success with his solo debut, Heartbreaker. His record company then declined to release it, saying it was “too sad.” (You will notice I am not attributing this quotation to anyone; this entire story could be completely fabricated, but I am presenting it for these purposes as I have cobbled it together from all kinds of websites with totally unknown reliability.) So Adams went back and recorded a new album, eventually called Gold, a more commercial-leaning album, with plenty of production and a big, classic, rock & roll sound produced by Ethan Johns.

Now, the Suicide Handbook album itself is a revelation as far as I’m concerned; it includes some of my favorite songs from Gold, a couple tracks that have surfaced on other Adams albums like Demolition and Love Is Hell, but all stripped down to the barest, Heartbreaker-like bones. There are also a good number of songs I have never heard before. It's good, real good. It's the sequel I've always wanted to Heartbreaker, in keeping with that sparse, beautiful folk-y sound Adams created on his debut (with production help from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings). How in the world did I not know that he had MADE it already?!?! Some lyrics are exposed in startling ways -- underneath some catchy, breezy songs I liked on Gold were some wrenching, beautiful lyrics. I mean, the songs have always been sad, but taken as a whole, you can see why this album was going to have such a, well, macabre title. And you can see why (as the internet would have it) the label said they wouldn't release it. These are internet rumors I choose to believe, thank you very much! The re-purposed (or pre-purposed!) songs are not just interesting from a compare and contrast perspective -- comparing them to those versions people like I am more familiar with from Adams' official releases -- they are excellent songs in any format, but this album feels of a single piece. The sound, spare-but-lovely production, melancholy songwriting, all of it, fits perfectly in this (nonexistent) package. It’s an excellent album from beginning to end and a shame it never got the actual, physical package it deserved; my only criticism at all is that I didn’t know it existed for so long. I certainly feel like a second-class Ryan Adams fan, believe me.

Thanks to Rawkblog for (finally) cluing me in. And thanks to the internet for (eventually) providing me with what I assume is the actual music (for free, natch). You are now welcome to go and do likewise.

Since I have no idea what the album art was ever going to be, I am including in the post what seem to be two strong possibilities, according to the internet. Of course, they are very likely created by rabid fans and never so much as seen by Ryan Adams or his record company. I like them all the same.

Who DOES Christopher Hitchens Think is Funny?

This is a question that has troubled the Western World for some time. At least since 2007, anyway.

First of all, who is Christopher Hitchens? I’m afraid even I barely know and have only the time to link to his Wikipedia page, not to read it.

Is he a writer? A wit? A bon vivant? A bear? All of the above?? I have certainly never read his book, God Is Not Great, though I am mildly interested in the atheistic premise and might be interested in reading it someday when I have literally nothing better to do with my life. And I confess to being only familiar in passing with his work in Vanity Fair and The Atlantic. I have seen him on TV a few times – what greater imprimatur of importance is there? – but he has always seemed to me inscrutable in that British way: “Is he being obnoxious to the host of this talk-show? I can’t tell! He sounds so polite with that classy British accent!” I also have no particular read on his political viewpoints, though he always seems to have one. I think. Perhaps Mr. Hitchens (may I call him Hitch?) is simply a self-styled contrarian, much in the same way I self-style myself.

What I do know is a whole lot about Hitch's views on comedy:
1) He is on record as thinking women are not funny in a mildly provocative 2007 piece in Vanity Fair (which seemed to me about as provocative on an intellectual level as “nanny-nanny-boo-boo”), and
2) he is returning (like a dog with its own vomit) to this same, verdant, well of inspiration once again in the most recent issue of The Atlantic to inform us that liberals likewise fail to tickle his seemingly unassailable funny bone.

So we know a (God is not) great deal about who doesn’t make Hitch laugh, but who does squeeze a wheeze of mirth from his tar-fossilized lungs? This is much less clear. It is admittedly a tall order for anyone to keep up with such a robust, rotund intellect on any level. I don’t think I have ever read anything he has written that has been the slightest smidgeon amusing to me, but again, he’s British and they are sometimes hard to read. I think his wit might be “dry” and his sense of humor somewhat “gallows”; but not many mere mortals are blessed with a wit so dry as to be desiccated, nor a gallows humor so asphyxiated as to be clinically dead. In this way, Hitch surpasses all.

We do know, according to his recent Atlantic essay, that Hitch teaches a class on Mark Twain – an old, funny-looking, white man – "at the New School in New York," whatever that is. Some might not feel comfortable making the logical leap that because Hitch teaches this class on Twain he therefore thinks Twain is funny. But as a self-styled, amateur logician I am personally willing to draw that conclusion and state it as fact. So let’s take what we know and apply the fundamentals of logic as I have convinced myself that I understand them and the rudiments of Venn Diagrams since I like pictures.

Let us again start our parsing with who is not funny. When Hitch says Liberals, obviously he means Jews, and when he says women, obviously he means people who aren’t interested in him. So if we remove from the comedy world all liberals, jews, women, and people who aren’t interested in Christopher Hitchens, we are left with two upstanding white souls that I can think of: Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Glenn Beck. Now we (read: I) know for certain that Hitch likes one of these comedic titans, but his views on Beck are, tragically, opaque. (At least until yet another magazine deadline suddenly rolls around and Hitch wakes in solitude from his silk-sheeted king-size posturepedic mattress with a snort of panic, and lumbers half naked from his shag-carpeted boudoir to his wood-panelled office, where his vintage typewriter and telegraph machine wait patiently for him to churn out and submit via Morse code some "fresh" provocation to his employers.) Yet, for as perverse as Hitch appears, I can’t imagine he would enjoy someone so common, so popular, and so potentially similar to himself. The rules of self-styled contrariness are clear: Beck must be out. And, in case you hadn't heard, Mark Twain passed away tragically in 1910, cut down in the prime of his life at age 75.

Who is out there, alive today, who might, by means of comedy, cause our own sourpuss Hitch to lugubriously raise one bushy British eyebrow in the most modest manifestation of mirth? Well, who else is a) not Jewish, b) not a woman, c) an old, yet still alive, white, funny-looking contrarian, and d) extremely interested in Christopher Hitchens?

Could it be that the only man erudite enough, always correct enough, old enough, white enough, male enough -- the only heir to Twain with sufficient wit to split his side is...himself???

Josh Ritter Reconsidered: I'm Man Enough To Admit When I'm Wrong

I’m constantly searching for that sweet spot where rock meets country meets alt-country meets folk meets pop meets indie rock meets smart lyrics meets catchy tunes meets interesting meets accessible.

One of my mellower faves the past few years has been Hem – a laid-back country-folk-pop outfit that has a penchant for sweeping melodies, lush yet restrained instrumentation, and soaring, beautiful vocals and vocal harmony. While they may skew slightly too far towards country for some (closed-minded fools), or too delicate for some (hot-headed idiots), they remain close to my heart. To that end, a couple years ago I went to see Hem at the Double Door in Chicago, as they opened for a guy I had only barely heard of named Josh Ritter. The show was kind of a disaster, as the folk-rock rowdies all waiting for Josh Ritter weren’t terribly respectful to the pencil-necked steel-guitar-and-harp fans who were there to listen to Hem. I’m fairly sure I spent most of their performance being frustrated at the crowd around me, and cautiously sizing everybody up to decide who it was safe for me to single out and aggressively shush. At any rate, poor Hem muddled through their show as I internalized all the collective shame I felt everyone in the audience should have been feeling. After Hem’s retreat from the face of loud barroom indifference, the headliner, Josh Ritter, came out looking and sounding like a kind of shit-kicking folkie, in the mold of a snarling young Dylan, and/or the mold of a snarling hipster like Ryan Adams.

The previously raucous crowd was immediately rapt, and my all the frustration and embarrassment I had felt for my poor, gentle Hem was instantly transformed into hatred for Josh Ritter and his unfair, arrogant sway over the boozy group. I shrugged my way through his set (an admittedly varied bunch of folk-rock rave-ups and introspective ballads). I was curious enough in spite of myself to download his at-the-time current release, The Animal Years, but my irritation at the concert had poisoned his well with me sufficiently that I listened a few times and set the album aside, generally unimpressed.

A couple years later I started putting together a selection of music that blurred those aforementioned lines between folk/rock/country/etc and decided to release The Animal Years from its mini-purgatory and add it to the burgeoning iTunes playlist. I found as I listened to that shuffled assemblage of impressive songs (ranging from Fleet Foxes to Great Lake Swimmers to The Low Anthem to M. Ward to Bon Iver to Andrew Bird) that the occasional Josh Ritter tracks sort of stood out, catching my attention somehow.

The Animal Years doesn't work particularly well for me as a whole album from beginning to end, but it does have a great, almost exclusively sparse, acoustic sound and most of the songs are extremely well-written. (A notable exception is the song "Thin Blue Flame" -- an eight-minute political preachy clunky folky faux-masterpiece with all the lyrical nimbleness of Barry McGuire's classic of modern verse, "The Eve of Destruction" and all the subtlety of Tool. Naturally, this is the song many reviews choose to highlight as a shining example of Ritter's Dylanesque brilliance, while I contrarily think of it as the quintessence of ham-fisted pretension.) All in all, though, the record was a good deal better than I remembered it, and only made stronger for being interspersed among some other music.

So, the years (and a couple better Hem shows) having mellowed my ire, I checked out what Josh Ritter has been up to the past little while, and ended up downloading his most recent album from 2007, The Historical Conquests Of Josh Ritter. In contrast to my previous feelings about his albums, Conquests works extremely well as a whole album: the sound is beefed up; there's a better balance of plugged-in rockers and acoustic tearjerkers; and the songs are still clever, yet shorn of some of the more insufferable politicking and lyrical showboating. It's a real good album, strong from start to finish. There's some Dylan, some Springsteen, even some Spoon/M. Ward/Bright Eyes. With some of this rocking & rolling and balladeering and genre-mixing-&-matching Ritter's up to, he might be getting perilously close to that musical-hybrid sweet-spot I'm always looking for. Stay tuned...

Photo of Hem courtesy of David Greenwald @ Rawkblog.
Photo of Josh Ritter courtesy of a random google image search for "josh ritter"

Notes of Note

I have been on another music binge, this time using the Hype Machine to see what other blogs are chattering about. This often turns up lots of relentless remixes, and a few underwhelming bands (The xx, being one. ZZZZ) but also some really great stuff. I think it's how I discovered Vampire Weekend, and low and behold, this new project album from Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend) and Wes Miles (Rar Ra Riot), aptly titled Discovery.

This synth-pop album is reminiscent of Postal Service beats, with lots of hooks, covers and old school chorus. The cover of the Jackson 5 "I Want You Back" has been in heavy rotation (RIP MJ) as well as this track, "Orange Shirt".



Another super find is Noah and the Whale. This album simply blew me away. For any fans of sweet folk with great orchestration, this is your ticket. Though this song doesn't appear on the latest release, I like the video.

David Mead: Almost and Always is available to download (legally) at last!

A few months ago, I weighed in on a new (?) David Mead album, Almost and Always, which I really liked. (And still like!) My only criticism/concern was that it seemed at the time to be impossible to find. Well, because I'm sure you turn to the Culturephiles for all the latest breaking news, I wanted to post about this album again because I just noticed it has finally appeared on Amazon.com for purchase or download. Click Here to download/buy! Good news for David Mead? Back on track? I hope so!

Furthermore, it appears that the album now actually has three more tracks than the version I have. So...enjoy the record at long last, if you are so inclined. And someone let me know how those last three tracks are!

Helpfully yours,
The Culturephiles

(Presumably this means you could get it off iTunes now too, but I'm too lazy to check. Also, let's not let Apple get too hegemonical with our music downloads. A little competition is a good thing for us music consumers, and the Amazon Downloader thingie, while being a little weird initially, ends up being real convenient, and plops your purchases right into iTunes for you.)