No, I haven’t listened to it. No, I don’t intend to, and I don’t really think you should, either because Ryan Adams made sexual advances towards a 14 year old girl.
He wielded his power, influence & privilege in the music industry as an instrument of emotional bribery, suggesting Phoebe Bridgers could play support to him, but only under some very specific sexual circumstances. He demanded that Consequence of Sound magazine remove an article about his behaviour & they did. Read what Mandy Moore, his ex-wife, has to say. His entire band told us that they tried to intervene but he was crazed with the power he held. He then went on, following Bridgers’ statement of what happened, to issue a defence that read something like ‘I am genuinely sorry that I got caught.’
Consider his records through the prism of these decisions & actions. I promise that either it will sound different to you or you’re thinking about it wrong. I believe in second chances, but we’re talking about someone who deserves to be in jail & he’s still gets to make records? And you’re still listening to them? Fuck sake.
The first line of his new album is (apparently) ‘I remember you before you hated me’, which tells us Adams continues to employ the manipulative, weaselling tactics & language of abuse – see how he shifts the focus of the debate onto his victims, implying their hate & lack of forgiveness is the real problem here. Just what a cunt like that would do.
To all you dickheads saying ‘yeah but its dead stripped-back, like ‘Heartbreaker’!’ ~ there’s a hundred albums came out this year like that which deserve your attention more than this one by this washed-up actual abuser.
So zero fucking stars, try Will Johnson’s ‘El Capitan’, Matt Elliott’s ‘Farewell To All We Know’ or Courtney Marie Andrews’ ‘Old Flowers’ if you want beautiful from-the-heart stripped-back emotional honesty.
There’s none in ‘Wednesdays’, we all know that. Zero fucking stars & I’ve not even played it.