Ryan Adams prolific? Since 2000 when Adams started his post-Whiskeytown career he has officially released a total of 7 albums, not to mention a plethora of unreleased full-length albums and a Black Flagesque punk album with his one-shot band The Finger.
So yeah, I guess one could call Ryan Adams prolific, or maybe he just has a song writing sweatshop full of bedhead-ridden 20-somethings.
Jacksonville City Nights Adams’ second album of his 2005 trilogy finds Adam’s venturing back to his alt-country roots, but this time without the alt.
Laden with violin, strings, piano ballads and steel guitar with Patsy Cline-like arrangements Adam’s evokes the spirits of his country forefathers Gram Parsons, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and at times even Bob Dylan.
Jacksonville City Nights leads the listener in with a bar room stomp “A Kiss Before I Go” and then kicks the country up a notch with “The End” where Adams sings of a father whose voice he does not even know, “I don’t know the sound of my father’s voice, I don’t even know how he says my name.”
Then Adams takes an unreleased track from 2003’s Love Is Hell “A Hard Way to Fall” and turns it into a honky tonk classic where Adams muses over a lover he has lost and the pain it causes when he sees her with another man, “See her smiling at him, that used to be me. I could find her in a thunderstorm just by the way the rain would fall.”
Then Jacksonville City Nights hits its only mediocre track, “Dear John,” a piano ballad duet with Norah Jones that seems to meander along, and never really takes shape. Nevertheless Adams follows up the slight blunder with “The Hardest Part,” a track in the vein of his 2000 debut Heartbreaker with its acoustic guitar intro.
Then Adams does what he has always done so well, tell a sad story through song in the form of a mid-tempo piano ballad on “Silver Bullets.”
Finally the album reaches its best track “Peaceful Valley” where he sings in his raspy falsetto in the spirit of Gram Parsons.
Adams then follows with a set of tracks that bring this bona fide country album to a close with a set of tracks that are just as good as the first.
First with former title track “September” where a character jokingly forms a noose with a telephone while she gets bad news from a doctor.
Adams then follows with a former Whiskeytown rarity “My Heart Is Broken” that eclipses the original recording with its honky tonk steel guitar and maudlin violin.
The production of Jacksonville City Nights is not lush, but anymore would be overkill for the true-to-country style Adams and his backing band the Cardinals were going for. Adams’ whiskey-strained voice fits the mood and helps him to accomplish his goal.
Ryan Adams and the Cardinals are a rock or country fan’s answer to their longing the days where country meant something, in the ’50s, and the rock’n’roll that inspired so many in the ’70s.
I dare say that if this was the ’70s, Adams would be one of the biggest things happening in music, but unfortunately we live in an era where MTV and Clear Channel rule what and who we listen to while burying true rock’n’roll. * * * * 3/4

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