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Travis: Tonight we’re here to discuss Cold Roses, the first of three 2005 albums by singer-songwriter Ryan Adams. Cold Roses is a full-band effort, the first credited to Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, a group he worked with off-and-on for several years. A loose-limbed country rock album, Cold Roses was touted as a return to form by many critics and fans after Adams’s experiments with Strokes-lite NYC rock and Brit-indebted mope rock on Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell respectively. For me, personally, Cold Roses is far and away the best thing Ryan Adams ever did, a well-produced and well-crafted set of songs in a style I enjoy that reminds of the Grateful Dead at their pastoral, recorded best on Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. Cold Roses is the only Ryan Adams album I ever regularly listened to as a full album, everything else, including the oft-praised Heartbreaker, too hit or miss for me to find pleasure in the whole rather than cherrypicking the songs I did like for playlists or one-off listens.

I know we’ll differ on this point, Tyler: I’d always found Adams’s work a bit distancing, the work of a craftsman rather than a true artist. Some of that was because of his constant genre dabbling, a lot because of his prickly personality and obvious fame-whoring. But with Cold Roses I could put my distaste of much of the man’s antics aside and enjoy the work for itself–not without its weaknesses, but enjoyable as a (fake double) album. At this point, following the 2019 revelation of Adams as a serial predator and genuine creep, this one’s ruined for me too.

Tyler: I suppose there’s no getting around my history as a fan of Adams, which colors my interpretation of both his work and his richly-deserved downfall.  Cold Roses is a clear high point, without doubt, but I also adored Heartbreaker, Love Is Hell, and the 2011 LP Ashes & Fire.  2001’s Gold was a sentimental favorite, representing my first exposure to Adams, and there were places in my heart for lesser asides like Rock N Roll and Jacksonville City Nights, amongst others.  I loved the music, and willfully forgave the untoward, oft-unhinged behavior of the musician.

All that conceded, I won’t dismiss the merit of your interpretation of Adams as a master of pastiche, not much more.  I think—thought?—there was enough of his heart in the lyrics to lend the tunes authenticity.  Now, after 2019, I wonder if the guy’s got much of a heart at all.

Travis: Does Ryan Adams have a heart at all? I think that’s a valid question to ask when revisiting this work.

Tyler: I have a hard time reconciling any of his “sweet” sentiments with how outright abominable was his treatment of women.  This guy doesn’t know what love is.

Travis: Nah, he doesn’t.

Listening to the ballads on the album now, knowing what we know about his treatment of the women who interested him sexually, all that tender singing and yearning and soul-searching comes across as sociopathic playacting from a malignant narcissist. When listening I was reminded of the thing I think you told me about, Elisabeth Moss referring to Fred Armisen’s best acting job: “pretending to be human.”

Tyler: That Adams “humanity,” too, was posed by him, and embraced by fans and some critics, as exceptional.  The troubled, hypersensitive sweetheart, turning out song after song, album after album, all those deep longing paeans to female romantic partners.

Travis: Well he’s definitely troubled and hypersensitive. Something I learned doing research for our chat tonight is that one of Adams’s 26 post-scandal albums contains a diss track against Jason Isbell, attacking him by detailing a sordid night Isbell had in a hotel room with a hooker while still deep in his cups.

Tyler: Ha ha ha ha ha Adams dissing Isbell.  Talk about punching above your weight class.

Travis: I listened to like 30 seconds of it, it has that same sound all of his albums after a certain point, when he started recording all of them at his own studio, have, just tinny 80s garbage.

Tyler: Lord have mercy.  Remember when, in the hours before the New York Times expose, he threatened to sic his “legal eagles” on the paper?

Travis: Well, he’s a delusional moron. And there are some delusional moron moments on Cold Roses. I’d like to point out the beginning of “Beautiful Sorta” when he does a riff on the beginning of the New York Dolls’ “Looking for a Kiss” that would make David Johansen roll over in his grave, if he were in fact dead.

It’s one of the few real sore thumb moments on the album, but it does seem to tie in, to me, to the fact that Adams saw, and probably sees himself, as a genius tied in to the flowing river continuum of rock and roll history. Like LeBron James talking about his legacy when he was 18, except LeBron James actually lived up to the hype.

Tyler: “Rosebud” is about one of Jerry Garcia’s guitars.

He’s a caretaker of the Dead’s legacy, you see.

Travis: You couldn’t throw a rock at a newsstand in the early 2000s without hitting a music magazine with a Ryan Adams interview where he was talking about how he was into .45 Grave, or Black Flag’s My War, or Emperor, all of these artists that had an edge he sorely wanted to associate himself with but clearly could not because his biggest hits were a song that fortunately had the Twin Towers in the music video right after 9/11 and a cover of “Wonderwall.”

He could have taken a lesson from the Dead in one specific way: He could have hired Robert Hunter to write the lyrics to “Cherry Lane” instead of doing some lazy swearing.

Jerry Garcia was like “I am not good at writing lyrics. I know this poet.”

But that takes self-awareness.

I mean, fuck, even on the songs I like on this album, the metaphor-mixing would be torn apart by a college writing workshop. I know the plateau is easy, but it’s also flat, that’s what a plateau is. So you wouldn’t hang your head on it, because it’s flat.

Tyler: There have been “punk” side projects scattered throughout Adams’s career.  I think of his “band” The Finger, a duo of him and friend Jesse Malin.  Sample song title: “Punk’s Dead, Let’s Fuck.”

Travis: I’m aware of the punk projects. The one he did in the early 2000s was serviceable Husker Du imitation.

Tyler: Is “Let It Ride” the best track here?

Travis: Yes, “Let it Ride” is the best song here, it’s his best song period.

Tyler: Oh yeah?

Travis: For me, by several orders of magnitude.

Though I still don’t know why he was leaving on a riverboat but riding easy down a road.

Tyler: No shade for “I wanna see you tonight/Dancing in the endless moonlight?”

Travis: Nah that’s fine.

Relistening to the album, with just my ears and not my mind, the rockers aged a lot better than the ballads, and disc two is much stronger than disc one.

Title track has nifty guitar work that reminds me a little of the Allman Brothers. “Easy Plateau” is a fun fake Dead song. “Let it Ride,” as I said, is the best song he’s ever done. “If I Am a Stranger” rocks.

I don’t know if you are aware, but among the 47 post-scandal albums he’s released are track-by-track remakes of Blood on the Tracks, Nebraska, and Morning Glory.

Ryan Adams is not the Bob Dylan of Oasises, or the Bruce Springsteen of Taylor Swifts.

Tyler: Ryan Adams might be the Bradley Nowell of Jeff Tweedys.

Travis: Bradley Nowell had the good taste to die before he ruined too many other lives.

Dedicated member of the current lineup of the Cardinals: Don Was.

Tyler: And Adams did ruin lives.  That’s what makes enjoying his work so untenable for me.  The fledgling bassist that Adams essentially molested via video chat when she was a very young teenager, she turned away from music because the experience took so much out of her.  Astonishingly, when a post-scandal Los Angeles Magazine published a deeply-misguided defense-profile of Adams, that same assaulted young woman provided a quote in support of him.  “Ryan is a good person,” it included.

Travis: That is terrible.

I am all for redemption stories. I believe people deserve second chances. But when Adams released his “apology” that was all the evidence I needed to know he is constitutionally incapable of being honest with himself, and as such, will never truly be able to make any amends to anyone he wronged, because he’d have to change.

He’d also have to believe it was he who did the wronging, not the world for “canceling” him. Speaking of–he’s not actually canceled. Almost no one who says they are actually is. He still gets a million monthly listeners on Spotify. The last time he played St. Louis it was at the same venue that I saw The Mars Volta and the Radiohead offshoot The Smile, the same place Elvis Costello is playing later this month. I’m sure he’s doing just fine.

Tyler: Did you see the texts his former manager leaked in the wake of the Times article?  “I’m not interested in this healing crap,” he notably messaged.

Travis: Probably the most honest thing he’s ever said.

Tyler: Back around, oh, 2003, I happened upon a VH1.com interview with Adams that did not stay online long.  In this interview, Adams talked about how, he didn’t just want to romance a woman.  “I want to get in your pants and make you come,” he told a theoretical love interest.  I find this especially amusing in the wake of Phoebe Bridgers declaring in her Adams-ripping “Motion Sickness” that she “faked it every time.”

Travis: I have not read Meet Me in the Bathroom but he apparently comes off as a real douche in that, too. I find it bizarre that he’s even in that book, but I guess he did have cool hair at the time. Still has the same hair–looks worse on a puffy 50 year old.

Tyler: I’ve read excerpts of that book, including the allegation that Adams was the first to turn Albert Hammond, Jr. onto at least one method of using heroin.

One of Adams’s buried projects is a four-track “bluesy” track-by-track remake of Is This It.

Travis: That sounds fuckin’ stupid.

Tyler: Also stupid: Adams asserting that he was the initial choice to play the Cold Mountain role that went to Jack White.  This during a message-board rant against White and The White Stripes.  Before you think you might agree with the guy on dissing that band, though, you should know that he backpedaled immediately upon the release of Elephant.  “That guy knows rock and roll,” Adams approximately wrote of White.

Travis: And they both abused Karen Elson?

Tyler: Oh yeah!  Adams fucked with her, too.  She called him out on his fraudulent apologies, much to her credit.

Make that “public apologies.”  I don’t think Elson got the courtesy of a phone call.

He targeted Liz Phair, too.  They recorded some work together, which he stowed after she rejected his advances.  I mean, the list goes on.  These are notable women, too!  They’re in the public eye!   The sheer gall of it.

Travis: Complete loser shit.

Tyler: He’s appalling.

Travis: While his “cancelation” hasn’t seemed to affect his career or his earning power, it probably has affected his “legacy,” such as it was. I was already pretty sure he’d be a footnote years after his career, because like we both said earlier, I viewed it all more as pastiche than innovation and most of the music he’s made one can get equal if not better enjoyment listening to whatever it was he was cosplaying at the time. But now I’m pretty sure he’ll just be the guy who was Mandy Moore’s abusive husband and fucked around and found out with Phoebe Bridgers, not the guy who made Cold Roses.

Tyler: There’s a real satisfaction in seeing a talented artist like Bridgers, a survivor of Adams’s abuse, headlining Madison Square Garden with her friends, an honor Adams surely still thinks he deserves.

Travis: Cryin Adams imo.

Tyler: Travis, I think we’ve found a common, very easy plateau.  Cold Roses: good music.  Ryan Adams: horrible trash.

Travis: Now, let us ride. On a riverboat. Down a road.

Tyler: “Genius.”