Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.The third album this year from the prolific Ryan Adams, following Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, is easily the best. It may be his best work since Gold, offering a welcome respite from the slough of despond in which Adams has languished since the Love Is Hell two-parter cast a pall of gloom over his muse a couple of years back.
Which is not to say that 29 is exactly a party album - in fact, there's a pronounced melancholy to these nine long songs. The difference is the presence once again of producer Ethan Johns, Adams's right-hand man on Heartbreaker and Gold. Well attuned to the singer's emotional vagaries, Johns has ensured that these songs are sensitively arranged - not forced into tight corners, but allowed to settle, like mist, into their appropriate form.
In the case of the title-track which opens proceedings, that's something like the Grateful Dead's "Truckin", a jogalong boogie restrained from developing rockabilly panache. It's an autobiographical piece tracking Adams's feckless period in New York, "loaded on ephedrine, looking for downers and coke", unable to occupy his time satisfactorily, and lucky to get through it alive. "Most of my friends are married and making them babies/ To most of them, I already died," he observes, unapologetically acknowledging that in his case, "you can't hang on to something that won't stop moving".
The rest of 29 is more elegiac, with a haunted sense of solitude hanging over "Starlite Diner", and the contemplative piano ballads "Nightbirds" and "Blue Sky Blues". The episodic, drifting narrative of "Carolina Rain" features evocative images of entropy, missed opportunities, deceit and defeat, while "Elizabeth, You Were Born to Play That Part" has the hapless, hurt tone appropriate to a song with such a Morrissey-esque title. "Every night it seems like there's no tomorrow," sighs Adams, adding wanly, "Not that you will ever know."
Most memorable is the eight-minute "Strawberry Wine", a Neil Young-ish elegy for a friend that finds Adams drifting through offhand observations such as, "Can you still have famous last words if you're somebody nobody knows?", ultimately realising that he must cast off his gloom before he's too old to break out of it, "'cause it's getting winter, and if I want any flowers, I gotta get my seeds into the ground".
Here, as throughout, Johns resists the urge to embellish unnecessarily, relying on a simple accompaniment of acoustic guitar fattened with 12-string and ukelele. 29 is a sterling return to the form that had Adams tagged as one of the great talents of his generation.
DOWNLOAD THIS: '29', 'Strawberry Wine', Blue Sky Blues'
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments