Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – Jacksonville City Nights

Reviewing Whiskeytown’s Strangers Almanac for a larger magazine many years ago, I argued that if alternative country music were to produce a Kurt Cobain, Ryan Adams would be it. I was mostly wrong, so far. There was a dark clarity to Cobain’s work and a crispness, and no little amount of hard-won magic.

Though Adams has wielded the trappings of fame and chaos in much the same way Dolly Parton has used her femininity (that is, as a cloud behind which one is not supposed to see), he seems more inclined to idle along as a lower-case Neil Young, sniffing at this and that musical scent, embracing each new idea with momentary fervor.

And with each embrace, we are tantalized. Cobain, Parton, Young…those are big names, those are serious, powerful, committed artists, and Adams keeps giving hints that he might play in their league. Mostly he seems to lack the discipline, or the eye for detail, like a career AAA hitter who simply can’t figure out a major-league curveball. And he’s hardly a promising rookie anymore.

That first, raw Whiskeytown single ten years ago proclaimed he had started this damn country band because punk rock was too hard to sing. Loretta Lynn’s rejoinder notwithstanding (it ain’t that easy), Jacksonville City Nights is, oddly enough, Adams’ first real swing at country. It is also the second of three albums he is to release this year, not much like Cold Roses and probably not much like whatever’s scheduled to follow on the last Tuesday of 2005.

And for a good while Jacksonville City Nights seemed like the worst record I’d heard in ages. It’s not, actually. Now I can’t quite figure out why I took such an instant dislike to the thing, but it took days of listening on headphones to get past that first reaction.

Perhaps I don’t trust Adams’ art anymore. Certainly his embrace here of mid-’70s country-rock sounds threatens kitsch irony at every turn. The casual miking of his piano, the bending of his voice to new, more fragile purposes…none of it seems all that heartfelt.

And it begins badly: “The engine turns on a dime/but I ain’t goin’ nowhere tonight.” Turning radius has nothing to do with the ignition system, and unless that’s meant to be some Dylanesque evocation of a dime bag (are they still dime bags?; anyway, it’s not), it’s a particularly awkward reach for blue-collar credibility, and a mixed cliche to boot. But the chorus is beautiful, Adams’ voice is unusually tender against the steel guitar, and there are other lines — “the pain in the morning comes as easy as it goes,” “you can’t see tomorrow with yesterday’s eyes” — which, like the sweetness in his singing, mostly redeem the song. Except for the line about the girls at the bar “all loaded like freight.”

But why didn’t Adams (or somebody, anybody) fix that first line? He changed the album title three times, and dropped one song (“What Sin Replaces Love”, which sounds a little like 16 Horsepower) from the final release; clearly he cares deeply (or is hideously capricious, maybe both) about his work.

And so it goes. On “The End”, from which the album title is drawn, Adams begins, “I don’t know the sound of my father’s voice/I don’t even know how he sings my name,” but he blunders a couple lines later, turning the back of his head into a “worrying machine” and writing that “the trains rode like snakes through the Pentecostal pines.”

It’s a gutty song, nevertheless. Maybe it’s true, certainly it’s true in the moment he sings it, which is all we can really ask. He takes his voice higher and softer than is accustomed, dances around pitch, and mostly carries it off. He and the Cardinals are agile and credible and supportive throughout this straight mid-’70s country-rock setting. And, see, after a while you come to believe them.

“The hardest part is loving somebody that cares for you,” he sings on “The Hardest Part”, but the proof is in “Games”, one of the album’s most successful songs, a simple and effortless piece about pain and love and loss. Which is what they’re all about, leavened with whatever he’s drinking that night.

If there’s a core to this album, it’s next, the piano-led “Silver Bullets” (which isn’t about Coors) and “Peaceful Valley” (which is about, of all things, God). “Peaceful Valley” is the nugget you will pluck from this album, the moment where every single thing he’s trying to do falls into place. It is a tender, fractured, assured song, full of yearning, Adams’ voice pushed even higher and given no place to fall, asking, “Can I still smoke cigarettes and have my coffee/Up there in heaven/And a bottle of wine?”

There it is, that click. That moment where one is in the presence of greatness, and there isn’t a false phrase or a misplaced note anywhere to distract.

Tie those songs to “The End”, and some of his more prescient lines about relationships, and one is left with the eternal hope that he might be maturing. Which is a good thing. We don’t need another Cobain. We do need Ryan Adams, still, with all his imperfections. For they are ours, too.