[Today: Sifting through the wreckage of love gone bad...]
The heart is a strange symbol of love’s energies. When a relationship burns out and fades away, it’s the mind that’s left wandering over the past, replaying what once was, and dreaming of what might have been. Meanwhile that damned heart just keeps on beating a steady monotone, pushing love’s victim forward into a desperate future full of long nights. Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker is the perfect soundtrack for one of those whiskey-soaked, sorrow-drenched, late night bouts of despair.
Adams was just 27 when he recorded this album, but he sings with an old man’s soul. He’d recently left the band Whiskeytown and broken up with his longtime girlfriend, and the breadth of his grief is etched deeply into each of these songs. In 2001 he told journalist Barney Hoskyns that “Heartbreaker is absolutely raw as hell. And I was really raw. When I made [it], I had parted ways with everything I’d known for almost five and a half years: my girlfriend, my band, New York.” To beat back his blues, Adams headed to Nashville and recorded this album with the help of his friends Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.
It opens incongruously enough with Adams and Rawlings debating about which Morrissey album contains the song ‘Suedehead’. But from there Heartbreaker quickly descends into a beautiful, country-tinged pity party. ‘To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)’ touches on the exhileration that even broken love can bring. ‘My Winding Wheel’ is a desperate plea to an indifferent love. ‘Come Pick Me Up’ sees Adams bargaining with himself over something that will never be. Heartbreaker covers every angle of lost love, with Adams’ harmonica punctuating the gloom and floating around like the ghost of happiness past.
A few years ago I purchased a used LP copy of Heartbreaker. When I got it home, I realized that the previous owner had meticulously (and thoroughly) scratched out the song ‘Why Do They Leave?’ so that it could never be played again. But that isn’t such a surprising development. This is powerful music loaded with heavy emotions – the kind that can get a jilted lover stirred up enough to pull out a knife and start carving stuff up.
Listen: Why Do They Leave?
Listen: Oh My Sweet Carolina
Listen: Damn Sam (I Love A Woman That Rains)
Tags: Barney Hoskyns, David Rawlings, Gillian Welch, Heartbreaker, Ryan Adams, Whiskeytown
6 March 2009 at 8:34 am |
Love this album.
6 March 2009 at 9:37 am |
Thanks for reminding me about this album… and I LOVE that your copy has ‘Why Do They Leave?” scratched out! You can’t do that with a CD!
1 January 2010 at 11:03 am |
[...] 10] Ryan Adams | Heartbreaker (2000) – The heart is a strange symbol of love’s energies. When a relationship burns out and fades away, it’s the mind that’s left wandering over the past, replaying what once was, and dreaming of what might have been. Meanwhile that damned heart just keeps on beating a steady monotone, pushing love’s victim forward into a desperate future full of long nights. Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker is the perfect soundtrack for one of those whiskey-soaked, sorrow-drenched, late night bouts of despair. [Read Full Review] [...]