Channel J: Ryan Adams’ Accidental 9/11 Tribute Song

 

Ryan Adams got his start in the music industry as part of an alt-country band called Whiskeytown.  If any band has a more country-sounding name than Whiskeytown, I’ve yet to find one.

Actually, this isn’t entirely accurate, since Adams had been in bands before, but they’d split up before they ever had the chance to record more than a song or two.  Whiskeytown was the first real project that managed to get off the ground and launch Adams’ career.

The band formed in 1994 and had trouble keeping a consistent line-up, with only Ryan Adams and Caitlin Cary sticking with it from beginning to end.  Something Adams has said in interviews was that Whiskeytown wasn’t the kind of music he really loved to play, and perhaps that was reflected in the band’s tumultuous history.  Although I’m fairly certain Ryan Adams and Caitlin Cary remained friends, other band members clearly were not.  At one point during their Strangers Almanac Tour, founding member Phil Wandscher threw beer bottles at Adams throughout the show.  After a few more shows, Adams sent everyone but Cary home, pretty much firing the entire band on the spot.

Eventually, two albums were released and then Whiskeytown officially called it quits.  It didn’t help that their third album was held back for a couple years after completion and was finally released in 2001.  Looking back on their difficulties, it reminds me a little of what happened to the Canadian band Sky, although Sky’s history wasn’t fraught with quite as much strife.  The band was mainly a duo, but after releasing one album, the singer left, so a replacement singer was found for their second album.  She left, so another replacement singer was found, but after one more album which I don’t even remember seeing anywhere, Sky was done.  There’s only so much you can do if your band keeps losing members like a beat up car keeps losing parts.

Perhaps because he could see the writing on the wall regarding the beat up car that was Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams wrote and recorded a solo album a year after finishing the last Whiskeytown album.  Although his debut album Heartbreaker was critically acclaimed and even had a ringing endorsement from Elton John, success was slow for him.  It probably didn’t help that no singles were released from it and no music videos were made.  Whether he could’ve afforded to promote the album or not, Ryan Adams might’ve wanted the music to speak for itself, but if no one knows the music is out there, it’s hard to get noticed.

Although Adams had moved from New York City, stopped in Nashville for a bit and then ended up in Los Angeles, he still seemed to look fondly back at some aspects of his time in New York City.  He was fond enough of his time there to write a song about it for his second solo album, a double album initially titled Career Suicide, but which would later become a single album titled Gold.  The song, titled “New York, New York” appropriately enough, was about a relationship he had while living there which ultimately didn’t work out, but as the lyrics declare, “I’ll always be thinkin’ of you/I’ll always love you though New York.”

Looking back at Gold like I am now, it’s interesting to look at what the critics thought of it.  There were some who were incredibly negative, considering its abrupt change in tone compared to Adams’ previous work, especially its first single.  It was brimming with the kind of optimism that was missing from his Heartbreaker album, but not every critic liked that from him.  Although the majority of opinions were positive, one of my favourite negative opinions stated that after five years, Adams would look back at Gold and admit that he knew it wasn’t good.  However, fifteen years after Gold was released, Adams called it an awesome chapter in his life.

“I wanted to explore hope again. I wanted to write songs about what it felt like to be kissed again.”

Although his original vision of Gold was to be a double album that sounded like a 70s AM radio station, with different styles of music that all somehow would work well together, the record label had a different idea and released Gold as a single album with several tracks cut, but put those tracks back in on a bonus disc so they could charge for a double album but only have it count as one album towards Adams’ contract with them.

Unlike with Heartbreaker, Adams had more money to work with when it came to promoting Gold, and so he went to New York City to film a video for the lead single, the aforementioned “New York, New York”.  The plan was to feature New York City prominently in the video and, rather than the Statue of Liberty, feature the World Trade Center in the background of several shots while others would be at locations featured in the Friends opening, because Adams was a big fan of the show.  Filming occurred on the seventh of September, 2001.

Unfortunately, the United States, and indeed the world, would forever be changed just four days later, when the World Trade Center was destroyed by a pair of airplanes that were deliberately crashed into it.

Life changed for Ryan Adams, too.  Although “New York, New York” was not at all written with the purpose of healing a country after an attack, Adams found himself invited to perform it on late night shows.  Instead of a song where the name of New York was used as a substitute for the lover he left behind, it became a love song for New York City itself, and was one of the first songs Americans turned to in order to feel better about the tragedy that happened.

The single was released in late November, and although I can’t find release information for the video, I seem to remember it was shown in September.  My memory isn’t a reliable source of this information, though, and should be taken with a grain of salt, but it does seem to me like Adams, by sheer virtue of having the song already written and the video already shot before the attack, must’ve been one of the first to release a song dedicated to New York City in the wake of the tragedy.  He certainly beat other artists like Cher to the punch, who also took a song recorded before the attack and used it as a tribute to New York City.  Cher’s music video would also be filmed there, but well after the attack.

Gold was released on schedule exactly two weeks after the attack, on September 25, and possibly due to “New York, New York”, was his best-selling album to date, with 364,000 copies sold in the United States according to Wikipedia (closer to 425,000 as of 2013) and over 800,000 sold worldwide.

Unfortunately, this would be the most success Adams would ever achieve in his music career, although a few later songs would reach the same heights on the charts that “New York, New York” did.  Even the similarly loved album Easy Tiger would only sell a quarter of a million copies.

Despite high praise from critics and endorsements from some of the biggest names in the music industry as well as the fortuitous timing of having a very well received New York City anthem that happened to be ready to be released when the city needed it the most, Adams’ career hasn’t exactly lit the world on fire.  His albums since Gold have been received relatively well, especially from fans, but there has been a noticeable lack of a definitive hit after “New York, New York”.

Still, for one brief moment in 2001, it was Ryan Adams who the United States turned to for comfort in dark times.