ten artists: ryan adams; « [last year's girl]

This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series ten artists

Another occasional series, this one involving actual writing and inspired by two of my favourite music boys. Scott, whose Wack Beats ruminations on music and film are frequently more entertaining than the subject matter, has been working on a list he’s calling The Forty Artists That Shaped Me. While I don’t have as many as forty (that I love, sure, but that changed my life?), I really liked the idea… and then Steve pointed out that I never followed up on his Ten Albums To Tell Someone Who You Are.

So here’s my compromise: ten artists that shaped me, and quite possibly the albums they did it with.

There are certain albums that never fail to lift your mood, even on a rainy August morning in Glasgow when you realise a little too late that you left the house in inappropriate footwear. There are certain songs that alter your outlook so fundamentally that it only takes a whisper of the opening bars to send you back to 2002. Kiss me, slow and softly, make me dream of you he sings, and despite his faults I fall in love with him the same way I did at nineteen.

I wasn’t a Heartbreaker girl, which some people find a little surprising. Certainly it’s his best work, and the album that’s come to mean the most to me over the years, but I don’t know if the angry little riot gurrl I was trying to mould myself into at the time would have made such a side-swerve. Although the rawness later appealed to me, and I can understand why Gold must have had its detractors at the time (but it’s an album that deserves another listen, and blows the cobwebs out of most of his later work), it was a work of slick, bright, countrified rock that made me fall in love with Ryan Adams.

I guess the timing was right for me to discover an artist for myself. The 1990s were over, and so were grunge and riot grrl. It didn’t mean that I couldn’t enjoy the music, which was still new to and spoke to me, but it meant that the good stuff was finite. My favourite bands weren’t releasing new albums, and they certainly weren’t going on tour. I’d been to a couple of gigs that were a little more intimate than seeing Nanci Griffith with my dad in the Concert Hall by that stage – I’d got separated from my male friend when the crowd surged forward during the Cardigans’ big hit on my first visit to the Barrowlands at fifteen, and he got angry because he’d promised my mum he’d look after me. It had been a fantastic experience, once I had extricated myself from the chest-crush at the front, and I had discovered the sheer joy in singing along to the songs that you knew from taping off the radio. I’d trailed King Adora and their mad hair through the student union with another old schoolfriend and a girl I never told anybody I was crushing on. I needed a contemporary fix – and I found it on Q Magazine’s end of 2001 compilation. The song was called “The Rescue Blues”, and the pictures of the artist himself in the magazine were pretty. I went out and bought the album the next day.

I’ve written screeds in this blog every time Ryan Adams has had a new release out, so you only need to click the tag link to see that although my enthusiasm for his recorded work – and live shows – has waned in recent years, my appreciation of the man and what his music has meant to me never has. He was the thread that connected me to home and kept me sane when I was living on the other side of the country, getting up early to grab a new release from HMV on Princes Street and make it my “album of the day” on my battered CD walkman. His were the songs I soudtracked my crushes to, walking down the street and picking a line from Whiskeytown’s Pneumonia for every boy. The first time I saw him live was unexpectedly one of the better nights of my life, despite me punting my sister’s ticket to a tout because she was too ill to come with me: I wriggled my way to the front by chatting with a couple of boys, and Ryan drank champagne and pulled on a Celtic shirt one of the crowd tossed to him. Security stopped me from snapping even a blurry photograph, and the boys and I had to explain to the band why half the crowd booed since we waited outside until 1am.

[I suspect the definitive review of that particular night will show up during my tenth anniversary series - let's just say it was a good one, and probably repeats much of what I have already written here.]

But probably the two biggest things that Ryan Adams did for me had very little to do with his own music: he opened me up to whole spectrum of artists, from the ones who inspired him (Dylan, Westerberg) to the ones who came after. And he soundtracked a period of my life when everything was changing. I got my tattoo the morning after walking out of a concert at the Edinburgh Picture House last year – a little piece of album artwork that means more to me than just the first shelf of my record collection.