Anti-Climacus

I've been thinking a fair amount in the last week or so about Whiskeytown and Ryan Adams more generally. The leading question has been: how can someone who writes such excellent songs write so many terrible songs? Faithless Street is better than Strangers Almanac, but both of them have some depressing low points: Adams' fake honky-tonk voice for a bunch of the Faithless tracks, and the tendency of certain songs on Strangers to go on long past their natural conclusions ("Everything I Do" being the worst offender, but not the only one). The same is true of Adams' solo material, even Heartbreaker, generally acknowledged as his best. For every "Damn, Sam, I Love a Woman That Rains" there are two songs where he mumbles incomprehensibly over a minimalist guitar accompaniment.

The answer, I think, is that there are no tricks to his songwriting: the same basic chords in very simple patterns, which requires the lyrics and melody to do a lot of the work. He's an excellent writer of melodies, particularly in finding notes within the chord which would not usually be the ones sung, cf. the ending of the second line in the first and third verses of "Oh My Sweet Carolina," or the "for anyone you think could outdo me" line in "Winding Wheel." His lyrical content depends largely on his ability to find a striking line or concept, where "Dancing with the Women at the Bar" is wonderfully evocative.

And, really, there's not that much to the song: a very slight variation on the words of the verses, and the same chorus every time. The verses are in a minor key and the choruses in the relative major, no bridge, nothing else out of the ordinary--it builds in a typical alt-country sort of way. All of which is to say, I guess, that analysis can take you a certain distance, but on a certain level you either like something or not.