He lauds Easy Tiger alongside Gold, Cold Roses, and Jacksonville City Nights as an album that gets better with each listen.  But no mention of 29, the album that should follow Jacksonville on that list.

29 especially confounded critics, even for a Ryan Adams release.  Released in December of 2005, only months after his double-album Cold Roses and his countrified snapshot Jacksonville, 29 left a sour taste.  The absence of his backing band “The Cardinals” and the muted palette, resting on simple piano arrangements and distant guitars, created the impression that 29 was also the last of the three albums to be recorded.  Tom Mo(r)on of Rolling Stone and Stephen Thomas Erlewine of All Music Guide attributed 29’s particular sound to “exhaustion.”  They surmized that after writing and recording two very good albums, Adams simply ran out of gas for his third of 2005. 

Adams probably was exhausted for the 29 sessions but for far different reasons.  He recorded the album with Heartbreaker producer Ethan Johns in August of 2004 at Three Crow Studios in L.A., before either Cold Roses or Jacksonville.  Prior to its recording, 2004 had been a memorable year for Adams for all the wrong reasons.  His record label Lost Highway famously rejected the brilliant, sweeping Love Is Hell as a worthy follow-up to Gold in 2003, opting instead to release a rash of recordings Adams had been working on for fun, cheekily titled Rock N’ Roll (except displayed backwards, to be read in a mirror).  Though it landed on the “Best of” lists of Spin, Rolling Stone, and Blender, that album’s reputation hasn’t fared well of late.  Love is Hell, which Adams was forced to release initially as two separate EPs, fared much better with critics and fans alike.  His cover of Oasis’ “Wonderwall” earned him a Grammy-nomination, and album closer “Hotel Chelsea Nights” has become something of an instant classic.

But his concerts were getting more erratic.  Though Adams has never been shy about his substance abuse during that period (especially of late), it was beginning to have an effect on his live performances.  It all came to a head when Adams toppled from the stage while performing “The Shadowlands” at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool.  He had to undergo surgery on his wrist, which had been partially severed from his hand in the accident.  After an intense period of rehabilitation on his hand and wrist, Adams, with help from longtime guitar guru J.P. Bowersock, had to teach himself how to hold a guitar all over again.

29 is located in this moment and finds Adams at his most thoughtful.  The album deploys multiple literary structures to help Adams, in his own words, “write himself out of his twenties.”  In an interview with Pitchfork, the elitist online indie publication, Adams described the album as a collection of nine story songs, each nine minutes long, one for each year of his twenties.  In fact, none of the songs are nine minutes long.  His record label probably shuddered at the idea of marketing such a venture, but 29 does more closely resemble a Romantic “song cycle” than a rock album.  Songs like “Starlite Diner” and “Elizabeth, You Were Born to Play That Part” evoke the atmosphere of Robert Schumman’s Carnaval cycle.  The title track introduces the setting as “nightime songs” and with song titles like “Nightbirds” and “The Sadness,” Adams seemed to be yearning for something along those Romantic lines.     

There’s also an intruiging obsession with water on the album that speaks to one of the albums largest concerns:  Staging Adams’ death, and, implicitly, his rebirth.  Just listen to the way Adams’ vocals get washed out in distortion as he moans the words “into the ocean” on “Nightbirds,” or asks the sky “when you gonna learn to rain?” on “Blue Sky Blues,” only to see it indulge him at the violent conclusion of “Carolina Rain.”  Even the electric guitars on “29” sound like they’re being played under water.  Freud would be proud.

The most compelling structure on the album, though, is the mock-heroic structure.  The harshest criticisms of 29 have always been leveled at the title track and “The Sadness,” the only rockers on the album.  The song “29” does sound an awful lot like the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” and Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing,” and “The Sadness” is hilariously stuffed with mythical imagery.  But as a mock-heroic document, these songs work in 29’s favor rather than against it. 

“29” is a rambling opener that presents the story of Adams’ career like the stained legend it is.  Train-hopping, police chases, a dog named “Chet,” and “mystery pills” are just some of the highlights, as Adams proclaims “Nobody loved me, and nobody ever tried!”  It’s sung with such theatricallity that it’s hard to take seriously, but that’s what makes Adams such a compelling figure.  That line between the myth and reality of his genius, his albums and their convoluted back stories, is always blurred.  Adams, more than anyone else, is responsible for this complication.  When critics hailed him as a genius upon the release of Heartbreaker, he was right there with them.  With its mannered but impassioned storytelling, “29” debunks the “southern wunderkind” myth as much as it perpetuates it.  “The Sadness” seeks to do the same kind of debunking, as Adams frets over “something at the window” calling him Beyond and having to “stand and fight God.”  Nowhere are the outlines of the mock-heroic landscape more clear, as Adams places himself in an over-blown dance with Destiny to the sound Ennio Morricone guitars.

Adams seems a little more genuine about his own emotional crisis, but even that’s tempered with a wink.  He stages several of his own death scenes, most notably at the end of “Carolina Rain,” where we leave him in a puddle of blood and rain “at the banquet hall where the gun went off.”  Elsewhere he sings “I feel like a body stuffed into a trunk” on “Nightbirds,” and of his friends he says, “To most of them I already died” on “29,” but these sentiments seem more humorous than sad.  If anything, he's pointedly acknowledging the ephemeral nature of his “it-boy” status in the early 00s.  Some friends . . . .

It isn't until “Elizabeth, You Were Born to Play That Part” that Adams seriously tackles the ephemeral, and it's a profound moment.  Allegedly (because you can never be sure), Adams wrote the song about a friend who had just endured a miscarriage.  Lines like “Every night it seems like there's no tomorrow/Not that you will ever know” and “I'm waiting on someone who just won't show” are loaded with the tragic implications of a premature death for a premature life.  The real stunner comes at the 2:25 mark, when, in a barely discernable voice, Adams reflects, “I've tried everything but that . . . oh, Lord . . . .”  What follows is a gorgeous, starry-eyed coda that implies a doubly tragic ending to the story.  It's one of the best songs he's ever written.

Remarkably, 29 doesn’t sound as meticulous as it is.  It’s one of those recordings that sounds spontaneous, like one night he just decided to let the tape roll; the result is an album that is simultaneously murky and immediate.  It’s worth noting, too, that 29 didn’t underwhelm everyone upon its release.  Uncut magazine bestowed the rare five-star review on the album, reporting a “new level” in Adams’ songwriting.  It certainly is his most layered, complex recording to date, the songs stretching themselves impressively beyond their chords and lyrics to echo in the realm between life and art, and it’s the opinion of this humble writer that it’s his best.  With multiple listens, you might agree.