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Music Navigator |
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Whiskeytown (from left): Ryan Adams, Phil Wandscher, Steve Terry, Caitlin Cary and Jeff Rice |
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Whiskeytown,
Adams is currently reading Servant of the Bones and Light in August and calls Cormac McCarthy one of his favorite authors.
The band's name came from several sources, including "Deadtown," a song Adams played in an old band, a Greg Sage and the Wipers song called "Doomtown" and an idea. "Maybe Whiskeytown had to be this fictional place where everyone was loaded," Adams explains.
Adams likes Long Island iced tea, but when he goes for the hard stuff, he says, it's "really crappy, bottom-of-the-line shit. I like Maker's Mark, expensive stuff, but I figure I might as well stay on the crap because you're going to puke on Maker's Mark or Old Forest."
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Country Preview |
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Heartach to Heartache |
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Whiskeytown's Ryan Adams knows about crying into his beer. |
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If punk was about rage and grunge was about pissed-off frustration, Americana is about depression. Not depression in the flighty Prozac Nation sense, but depression in the sense that life is a series of minor disasters and strange episodes that most of us can't control. Country music can be uplifting and joyous, but its greatest works are about heartbreak, longing for a better life and plain old despair. It's about sadness on a small level, dealing with the day-to-day traumas that everyone faces--the ones that never make headlines, but shape and affect people's lives. Even at 22, Ryan Adams, leader of Whiskeytown, knows about this kind of sadness. He's young enough to sound thrilled about two sold-out shows, yet mature enough to realize that it doesn't have any effect on a broken heart. The band is touring in support of Strangers Almanac, its second album. It's a stirring collection of moody, twangy numbers all made stronger by Adams' powerful, already weathered vocals. Three duets with Alejandro Escovedo are among the album's strongest songs, especially "Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight," which is as close to a sucking-the-top-of-a-longnecked-Bud tearjerker as it gets. But the smooth melody may have you nodding along without realizing the pathos of the lyrics. This happens throughout Almanac, and it's part of what separates Whiskeytown from a crop of similar bands. Adams twists meaning and mood in a way that makes these songs worth listening to and thinking about. He says he's surprised now when he listens to the record. "The record's the least favorite thing that I've recorded," he says, sounding as sincere as a 22-year-old can. "I had a lot of trouble singing that record because my heart was totally broken. When I listen to it I can hear myself being wounded, but other people seem to think I had this elated sense of spirit." Some might think this gives him material, but Adams demurs. "That's a cheap, rock-boy thing to do," he insists, "get in a bad relationship so you can write a good record." Though Adams grew up in North Carolina, he didn't start out playing country. His most recent band was the alternative-rock Patty Duke Syndrome, but Adams scoffs at the idea that his genre-hopping is inconsistent. "I'm still as punk now as I was then, if not more. I never was really punk. Any of the bands I was in could never really be considered punk. It was not 'one-two-fuck-you.' "I think I had more of an American Music Club idea in my head when we started Whiskeytown, although definitely everyone else's ideas changed it to be more country," he adds. "I just wanted to use pedal steel, and fiddles and accordion and whatever we could get our hands on, just to make a really cool mood for all the songs that I was going to write." This casualness belies a thoughtful guy who's very conscious of both the benefits and the pressures of his situation. He still gets a little stage fright and is upset by negative reviews, but he tries not to mind. "I can't let myself pay attention to that kind of stuff," he says. "I'm far enough away from home as it is." Adams isn't talking about home in the sense of a place to live--which for him has been Raleigh, N.C.--but home as in a place where he feels it. "Even when I'm home now, it's not home," he says sadly. "I get treated different. I always run into people that I don't really know, but I feel obligated to talk to them. That makes me really paranoid or nervous, because I just want to get some milk." |
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