Great Albums: Jacksonville City Nights

Last year, I wrote a long long essay about Joni Mitchell's Hejira, an album that came to mean quite a bit to me. Since then, an album in the same vein would be Ryan Adams & The Cardinals' Jacksonville City Nights. I wrote a very long essay to accompany the thoughts this record stirs up in me, and maybe it reveals something of my personality that this is an album that's come to be so meaningful in my life. So, read on if you're interested.

Great Albums: Jacksonville City Nights

Ryan Adams is about something, I can say it with some certainty. Jacksonville City Nights is not Adams’s most well-regarded album – critically, that would likely be Gold or Cold Roses, although, none of his albums have ever received universal or overwhelming support. Jacksonville City Nights is not an album that represents Adams’ typical sound, sounding, as it does, like a night in a local country bar. Jacksonville City Nights is not Adam’s best selling record – Gold or Cold again take that title (Gold has sold 384,000 copies, Cold 185,000. Jacksonville has sold 100,000). It is not even the first or last album Adams released in 2005 – coming amidst an insane period of productivity for Adams and his new backing band, The Cardinals, it is in the middle of Cold Roses and 29, his three releases that year. Most people prefer Cold Roses of that bunch, the alt-country double album that really has become the Adams standard, a representation and “branding” of what his sound typically is.

But Jacksonville City Nights is truly my favorite Ryan Adams record, and I do think it is, in its way, his best and most complete single album experience. And I don’t mean that simply because its sound is such an aberration for Adams, I think that if sonically it is a different record, it is the most representative of the type of music he made – 3-4 minute guitar driven songs about angst, bad relationships, drinking, exhaustion, and self-destruction. Classic songs with a kick of addiction and recovery. Once in 2003, Adams made a loud, hard rock record called Rock N Roll, and on its final number, “The Drug’s Not Working,” we heard Adams at his most uncouth, shooting up in the back of a car, riding around the streets of LA in full desperation. Jacksonville City Nights is about that same desperation, but this time, he’s in the sticks. He’s just as drunk, mind you, and in truth the rest of his mentality is about the same, but he’s somewhere else entirely. But where Rock N Roll represented its self-destruction in loud guitars and screaming melodies, Jacksonville buries its self-destruction in fiddles and pianos. I loved Rock N Roll because it indulged Adams’s junkie self destruction. But Jacksonville is better, because it makes it beautiful.

Start with “A Kiss Before I go.” A quick “one, two” count, a twangy guitar and organ, and a piano that sounds like it’s made of broken glass. “The engine turns on a dime/ but I ain’t goin’ nowhere tonight/ I ain’t been goin’ nowhere for quite a while.” The melody is jaunty and backwoods, sweet even, but it’s a song about meaninglessness. “Can’t tell the truth in a house of lies/ Can’t see tomorrow with yesterday’s eyes,” sings Adams, who fondly remembers his nights “at the bar with every girl all loaded like freights,” just can’t do it anymore – one more drink and a kiss before he goes, moves on away from Jacksonville and begins to do something with his life.

Such searching is not unusual for any musician, but coming as it does with its lively melody and country production, it becomes an evocation of a rambling spirit, and of the persona Adams cultivates on this record – a worn out rambler dealing with the issues of life, death, love, and loneliness; it’s a persona of desolation and wanderlust, confusion and uncertainty. “A Kiss Before I Go” is the persona ready to wander, and “The End,” the true thesis-piece for the record, is the persona unable to. Even if he were to leave, “The End” seems to say, our main character is haunted by a world he inhabits regardless of where he is. “In the cotton fields out by the house where I was born/ the leaves burn like effigies of my kin.” This is Jacksonville, Adams’ home town. “Oh Jacksonville, How you burn in my soul, how you hold my dreams captive,” he sings – and it’s true. This Jacksonville is the center of Adams’ mentality, on and off this record. If Rock N Roll explored the destructive end of Adams’ demons, Jacksonville City Nights takes them from the beginning and feels their origins out – but they’re just as desperate here. In one comic moment on “The End,” Adams’ sings of a drunk morning at a diner, “The waitress tries to give me change/ and I say ‘nah it’s cool, just keep it,’” but he doesn’t just say it, he gives that line the exact dismissive slur he pictures it representing.

That moment adds to the centerpiece feeling of “The End” – a sublimation and glorifying of Adams’ addictions, Adams drops the countried-up guitar of his private thoughts and sings, instead, what must be the perception for everyone else – this dude is wasted. And when that chorus comes amidst wistful fiddle, organ, and piano, Adams seems to be singing in a tired, worn out cadence he doesn’t normally sing in – he warbles with perfect backwoods isolation. The nostalgia and the desperation are actually a great combo, however – they seem incomplete without each other, and together they’re a type of fulfillment. If “A Kiss Before I Go” is the persona of Adams wanting to break free of the meaninglessness of his life, “The End” is the truth that he can’t shake it off, that he’s stuck with it, his heart going back “suffocating on the pines/ in Jacksonville.” The song is, despite its melody then, quite miserable – a song of resolute surrender. “The End!” he screams and moans; he is stuck.

This sound must be the sound of Adams’s thoughts. He never made a record of the sound he has here. That piano in particular is such a jolt – I recall none on record that sound like it, its high country pitch so perfectly sounding like the back of a wooden country hall stage. “Dear John,” the record’s sad fourth track is perhaps the most striking and organic of each on the record. Norah Jones co-wrote the song with Adams and sings harmonies with him, but strangely, sings the lower register, with Adams’ warble taking the high part – her voice is a form of serene stability, while his voice is the loose cannon. In the recording as the piano picks up, you can hear chords moving around, or people, or the clicks of something you’re catching in action. The two together aren’t necessarily even creating a harmony, it seems something else, two voices in tandem singing of loss and missing, “I got a nice bed to sleep on/ and a chest of drawers where I keep these dreams of yours.”

But when the chorus comes, a new type of harmony takes hold, “You’re always mine to keep when you’re gone,” the two sing, but joined in full by the remainder of The Cardinals – J.P Bowerstock on electric guitars, Catherine Popper on bass and vocals, Brad Pemberton on drums, and Jon Graboff on pedal steel – it’s not simply harmony, it’s an idea that expands in beauty and seriousness. What a moment and a thrill it is – if “Dear John” is a song of missing someone, it is the organic combination of its instruments and the strangeness of the vocals that turn into longing, an idea that skulks like a ghost. You want to sing along with it, but you’re not entirely sure how – the music causes such a swell in your emotions you can’t put words to it. I picture myself sometimes listening to “Dear John” in the back of an empty hall, closing my eyes, crying a little.

Jones is a beautiful woman, but she’s most beautiful when she sings, and the two voices together create something I can’t put a name on, but it is, at its heart, the reason Jacksonville City Nights means so much to me. When I first bought Jacksonville, I was just in the beginning of my fandom of Adams. I bought Cold Roses and, though I initially resisted it – the album seemed full of great songs but lacked cohesion and vision – I had fallen in love and took a chance on Jacksonville for no particular reason. I thought of Adams as an artist with one great song in him after another, but wondered about his ability to create a sustainable vision on a complete album.

The more I listen to him, however, the more I think that is beside the point. For Adams, the song is the vision, the putting of every inane thought into melody, the expanding of words into ideas. Jacksonville seemed like a lunatic experiment of a record, but it’s “Dear John” that truly convinced me it was on to something, creating a sound that rises from the ground, an organic experience that leapt far beyond a song-to-song collection; this was a concept, a feeling, a character set to music. Whatever I thought of Adams before Jacksonville was not what I thought of him afterwards. Jacksonville was not a perfect record, and neither is Cold Roses or Easy Tiger or Rock N Roll or any other album of his I love. Adams is not a perfect man. These albums, different as each is, are him, are his thoughts and dreams and fears and loves, which is what music is, after all.

You reel from “Dear John” for a while, so it’s nice that it is surrounded by two neat, enjoyable country songs. “Hard Way to Fall and “The Hardest Part” are love-is-hard numbers whose desperate element is at its most fun. To me, “Dear John” is so strong that it creates the mood that retains the middle of the record – “The Hardest Part” and “Games” are lesser songs, certainly, but they are also sweet and, frankly, easier – as much emotion as “Dear John” packs, I would not be able to handle it if each song matched its intensity.

When “Silver Bullets,” the album’s 7th track, begins, I always feel like I’m in a car driving in the gloom. The piano is low and plaintive and sad, and the lyrics are Adams’ saddest too – “Go and get the gun, ‘cause it’s only getting worse,” he sings. How can any song be this sad, I have to wonder? “I can’t make you love me, if you won’t let me stay,” he sings, and the violins kick in. All desperation is sadness on some level. Sometimes on Jacksonville, as in “The End,” it’s sublimated, or, like on “The Hardest Part,” it’s joyous. “Silver Bullets” is what it truly must be – desperation that is a sadness. Later in the year, on the uneven but fascinating 29, Adams did a song called “The Sadness,” which sounds like a bullfight set to music of Adams fending off an impending, dooming depression. “Silver Bullets” is the gray extreme of that feeling. If you’ve ever seen a drunk man having a bad night and seen his eyes, they seem set to the tune of “Silver Bullets.” In other words – he was bound to get to a song this upsetting eventually.

If Jacksonville City Nights were a record or tape, “Silver Bullets” would end side one. As it is on CD, “Peaceful Valley” simply opens up a new direction for the record. “Lord take me on to the peaceful valley,” Adams seems to be pleading. “All my life I’ve longed for forgiveness/ but I can’t ever seem to get enough,” he sings. “Peaceful Valley” is a song made up of high-pitched fiddles, but it’s also surrounded by a vocal that’s just as high pitched. So central on the record, “Peaceful Valley” is a song of confusion, a song that pleads for the end of times, a song of profound desperation and anguish. Each chorus comes to the same, terrified conclusion: “All my life/ I’ve been rocked into the darkness/ with a gun to my head/ trying to find a peaceful song/ to sing when everything goes wrong/ till the peaceful valley calls me home.” Those words are a little frightening, and they’re sung as the music drops away, except for a simple country guitar that trails behind them, and the words “calls me home” are sung in Adams’ highest pitch possible, rising like the valley he expects to be taken to.

“Peaceful Valley” is Adams laying down the gauntlet, a drunken man stumbling and yelling at his God to end his confusion and longing. It is, I think, the song that defines Adams most thoroughly. His early records, Hearbreaker, Gold, and Love Is Hell are good, rather prosaic records of alt-country charm. There are great moments of pop and of sadness on those records – Adams is a terrific craftsman of songs – but my favorite from all three of those records is still Heartbreaker’s “Come Pick Me Up,” which lets its desperation loose. Adams freed himself some after Love Is Hell by making Rock N Roll, but he must have done it just because he had no other choice – at the time a raging drug addict and alcoholic, making songs like “Note To Self: Don’t Die” or “Wish You Were Here” (its chorus: “I’m totally fucked up/ wish you were here”) made exact, defiant sense. He gave himself a rebirth with the cardinals in 2005, and Cold Roses has, I think, Adams’ most perfect songs, with extraordinary alt-country numbers like “Let It Ride,” “Cold Roses,” and “Life Is Beautiful.”

But each has its element of desperation, which is what Jacksonville is about, and especially “Peaceful Valley.” I saw Adams, now 2 years sober, in January 2008, and “Peaceful Valley” was the second song of his set. The Cardinals now play it without fiddles, with loud, scorching guitars taking over their part, and the song is an invigorating live number. There is not even the acoustic country chord that follows the “Trying to find a peaceful song” lines around – they drop the guitars entirely and sing the song in four part harmony. What a thrill and what a confrontation – it puts the song’s desperation into an antagonistic perspective. It makes sense to me Adams would sing it early on in his sets too – this is, simply, who he is. Trying to find a peaceful song. To sing when everything goes wrong.

Till the peaceful valley calls him home.

You don’t quite know that the song has hit you, but the second side of Jacksonville City Nights takes a lot of time recovering. “September” is a nice, soft song that is not the album’s most memorable. “My Heart Is Broken” sounds just like the old country bar sing-along you never you knew, a steel guitar-led song of pure country heartbreak. “Trains” turns its guitars into the sound of train tracks running out a window, and is fun and dashing, and gets stuck in your head with no effort. “Pa,” which follows it, is more classic country – by that I mean it’s a tale of a dying dad, and the passing of a morbid legacy. It fits Adams’ attempt perfectly, but it’s also not exactly the record’s most memorable moment.

That true thread of the record is picked up again so memorably in its final two numbers, “Withering Heights” and “Don’t Fail Me Now.” “Withering Heights,” like “Dear John,” is a song whose piano and harmony seem to rise and elevate. This is a song that the record works up to, an actual quest for a solution to the desperation – “I’m a little shaky, gotta learn how to fight,” Adams sings. Adams and the Cardinals join together to sing, “It’s hard to see the ground from the withering heights,” and the four-part harmony that creates those words represents a sort of conclusion of the record’s ideas – the harmony is beautiful, it is expressive, and it is, in its way, conclusive and understanding. The “Withering Heights” he sings is shorthand for Adams’ longing and sadness, the drunken, elevated loneliness from which he sits with his dreams held captive.

Perhaps that is the feeling I identify with the most, a spot on which longing to be understood and set free keeps a person even more incarcerated in longing and misunderstanding. Jacksonville is the place Adams cannot escape from, and that captivity has created his personality – it has saddened him, sent him for the gun, and also made him who he is. “Withering Heights” is slow, full of lamenting guitar, and tough admissions, but it is, undeniably, hopeful and beautiful. It accepts his sadness for what it is. And that is, I think, what distinguishes Jacksonville City Nights from Adams’ other records. Though all of them are good, they don’t seem like a journey, and they are defiantly inconclusive. “Withering Heights” is a song you feel like you earn, a song that makes you happy for who you are, even though it is characteristically downbeat.

And lest you think Adams would capitalize on a small sense of hope, he closes his record with “Don’t Fail Me Now,” and begins the song with a dramatic piano entrance of foreboding and follows it with an equally foreboding string section. He drops the melody to a spare guitar and sings, “Oh gal oh gal with your darkened eyes/ kindle the woods and prepare the lies/ and don’t fail me now.” “Don’t Fail Me Now” have to be four of the least hopeful words in the English language. If “A Kiss Before I Go” starts Adams’ idea to be rambling and free, “Don’t Fail Me Now” finds desperation fueling his journeying, sustaining him, leaving him with a misery that keeps him going – a thing that is terrible, sure, but one he counts on that he cannot imagine being abandoned by. That “Don’t Fail Me Now” is in small, two-part harmony, and punctuated by a percussive three note bit on the piano, and segues into simply singing “You don’t do me right” repeatedly and then, “Why you do me wrong when the rope gets tight.” It’s a song of a cowboy facing a long night ahead of him and pondering the simplest of questions – why you do me wrong. Adams cultivates a desperate rambling persona so successfully on Jacksonville, that “Don’t Fail Me Now” is the exact right bit of desperation to leave him, lonely and stranded, somewhere out where the ropes are tight. Rock N Roll ended with Adams’ drugs failing him. They fail him here too, and he’s left alone and cold. Adams must have needed to get that out and recorded – the feeling that we’ll all be left in the cold trying to sing a peaceful song. Just as much, we need to hear it.