Is There Room In My Heart To Redeem Ryan Adams?

Does the soundtrack of a life and the talent of an artist get trashed based on moral failure?

My dearest BLURTers (still workshopping that…),

I’m back. Thanks for your patience while I took a much-needed hiatus to think about new essays and go on vacation (as much as “vacation” exists when you have a toddler). I didn’t get much writing done, to be honest, as I was largely out of my house and routine, making it more difficult to focus on myself and my writing. But I received so many amazing questions and topics from my call to ASK ME ANYTHING—there’s still time to weigh in—and I am working on answering those over the next few months. I am amazed and in awe that any of you actually want to read this newsletter and am eternally grateful for it, so thanks for your participation.

That said, I don’t have a new, neatly wrapped essay for you this week. But I have been thinking a lot about Ryan Adams. Yeah, the singer. For those of you who don’t know (or care), Ryan Adams is a singer/songwriter who got his start in a band called Whiskeytown (apparently formed in Raleigh, NC, where I write to you from at this very moment) but I think it’s safe to make the assumption that he really gained popularity with his debut solo album, Heartbreaker, in 2000.

The first time I heard Ryan Adams, I was 17, sitting in my friend, Nathan’s car. Nathan was a new-ish friend, and he did not go to my high school, but I’d drive to his house some 20–30 minutes away almost weekly. There we’d listen to music, or make after-school snacks like cheddar melted on Melba Toast, or curl up together in the fluffy, oversized chair in his living room to watch movies. My relationship with Nathan was the kind that’s only possible in youth, when one is too unassuming to jump to conclusions about the intentions of the opposite sex, and naive enough to believe that platonic friendship is infinitely possible without ever being ruined by hormones.

Nathan and I were bonded by our love of music and movies and our ability to somewhat naturally articulate all the big feelings encased in our teenage brains. We talked for hours. We laughed at all the same things. We challenged each other’s perceptions of life and art and society. We were both likable among varying cliques, social and friendly enough to be accepted by all, but artsy enough to prefer the company of geeks and emos. So there, on a sunny Mississippi afternoon from the passenger’s seat of his car, he did what teenagers still did back in the early aughts and played for me, “Come Pick Me Up.”

“You have to hear this new song,” he’d said, his brown eyes wide. I can still see him, lanky in his wide-leg jeans and crouched in the driver’s seat of his passed-down sedan, tucking his long brown hair behind his ears. At the first note of Adams’ forlorn harmonica, I knew I was listening to something that would impress upon me lifetimes of sadness, and isn’t that all we want when we are teenagers? Not ironically, it was also Adams who said, “when you’re young, you get sad.”

Nathan’s energy was calm, like always. He listened with the peacefulness of a waves gently lapping at dusk. We sat in silence together as the lyrics rolled from his tinny car speakers and over me. Words only a broken heart could hear. I swooned.

This lyrical artistry had only ever existed to me in songs by Ani DiFranco, my crunchy, beautiful, sexuality-morphing queen. I knew of few musicians that had so adequately and poetically captured the misery of being in love, of being dumped, cheated on, of being abandoned by some stupid older boy named Justyn with a “y.”

From that moment, I worshiped at the alter of heartbreak and harmonica nearly all of my 20s and early 30s. My college boyfriend and I played Adams’ records on repeat and dug up as many Whiskeytown records the early Internet would allow. On Halloween during a Cardinals show in New York City, attended by that same boyfriend, now an ex, I wept in a balcony for how this music had followed us through our fitful coming together to the destruction that followed. The night I gave Josh Ritter my phone number after one of his own concerts, when I met up with him in a hotel lobby three hours later, we talked, of all things, about Ryan Adams. We waxed on about Adams’ impulsive songwriting, his ability to shell out records like some infinite Pez dispenser.

Ryan Adams was a central theme in my social, cultural, and romantic life until 2019, when it was eventually revealed to the world that he was a catastrophic asshole and sexual predator. My first clue of his assholery (and addiction) should have been on the night I saw him perform live at City Stages music festival in Birmingham, Alabama. I was a senior in high school when I joined my brother, living in Alabama at the time, for the show.

After waiting what felt like days for Adams to take the stage, an eager audience gave him a magnificent applause. To which he responded, “HELLO, AUSTIN!” The applause tapered, likely in confusion, but this swell of southerners remained optimistic. It was Ryan Freakin’ Adams, after all! We love this guy!

He began his set in rockstar fashion, but his body language was twisted, sporadic. He mumbled in a presumably drunken state. Then at some point he shoved his female bass player, who shoved him back with her shoulder. This began a sort of body-checking dance between the two of them—all while both were expertly plucking their guitar strings. In my memory, this set ends very early, with Adams stomping off stage in a huff. Maybe I have superimposed this based on what all we know now.

The next year, my freshman year at The University of Alabama, Nathan asked if he could come visit. He was bringing a friend, he said. I’d find him somewhere to stay, I said. I hadn’t seen him in some time, and being that we were living in a pre-social media time, archaic with our palm-sized Nokia phones, I hadn’t spoken with him much, either. Without the salve of our weekly cuddling communes and music listening, I wasn’t sure what to say to my artsy, hometown friend anymore. I’d outgrown our dynamic, but being that I was still mid-process of becoming someone new, I didn’t exactly know what I’d grown into yet. I couldn’t see that, more than anything, I’d become incredibly selfish.

I don’t remember most of that weekend, but I do know that instead of prioritizing time with Nathan, I accepted a last-minute invitation to hang out with a boy I had a crush on. An older boy named Dave (standard spelling and all, the nerve). I justified this shitty decision by telling myself that Nathan wasn’t solely there to see me. With his buddy in tow, there’s no way we would have had the intimate one-on-one we were accustomed to. People loved coming to party at Alabama. He’d have a great time, I insisted to myself. I didn’t see him much at all that weekend. Maybe he even left early. It’s a bad feeling, realizing you’re an asshole.

I have since apologized, and Nathan was gracious, but we were never the same after that. We drifted, and now my time with Nathan is just another set of memories stalled in time, set to a Ryan Adams song. Now, four years since we all came to know about Adams’ moral failures, I’m wondering what to make of my own relationship to his music.

I believe in second chances; I understand addiction makes people act in all sorts of unappealing ways; and I don’t support cancel culture, but I’m also not comfortable supporting an artist whose ego and alcoholism allowed them to get away with treating women like shit and using influence and authority as control tactics. My therapist taught me it’s OK to hold two opposing feelings at the same time, but as a feminist in our consumerist culture, I wonder when I put my foot down? As the mother of a daughter, do I have a moral or ethical responsibility to reject people who perpetrate crimes that could be one day committed against my own child? Does forgiveness mean forgetting? Does it excuse shelling out more money to the perpetrator?

I realize to many this internal debate is silly, dramatic even. I have an emotional connection to Ryan Adams’ music because it was only some of the most prolific sounds my hurting youthful heart had ever heard, and it remains some of the most intimate soundtrack of my life, and then the guy went off and did some gross stuff. Big whoop, he’s only human. Separate the art from the artist. If we continue to deny the artist, are we, ourselves, perpetrating cancel culture? Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance? But if we can’t acknowledge what we stand for in 2023, if we can’t use our money and efforts to support the world we want to live in and diminish the aspects of the world we want to go away, then have we learned anything? I don’t know.

When I met my husband, a musician, it was clear he felt lukewarm about Ryan Adams’ music, though he appreciates the talent. At first this fact was devastating to me. Would our disparate tastes in music be a hurdle to overcome? Could I truly love someone who didn’t also love Ryan Adams? Had this man ever even known devastation?!

But his heartstrings simply don’t tug at the sound of Adams’ crooning vocals, pristine harmonies, and melodic pedal steel like mine do. He has no memories of Adams’ music in which he is bound inside the arms of a true love, nestled inside a pick-up truck beneath a balmy summer night, listening to cicadas and wishing for this moment to never end; he never wept beneath the shrieking notes of a steel guitar from a venue balcony while a heart throbbed for what once was. He did not set Adams on Shuffle and Repeat during long drives through winding country roads or short-lived romances that calloused an already pierced heart. His most treasured, aching memories are, for all intents and purposes, Ryan Adams-less. And I just wonder if my new memories will be, too.