Ashes & Fire by Ryan Adams

I am not sure if any performers release more albums year after year than Ryan Adams. Some albums are great but most are more workmanlike. Nothing has measured up, at least for me, to the depth top to bottom of the albums such as Gold and Heartbreaker released at the start of the last decade.

Ashes and Fire is a step up from most of his albums though still not on a par with those early efforts. For this album Adams has given up the rock and roll jacket and is singing mostly small songs, in a soft voice and smoky ballads.

The album has received good reviews and rightly so. The first song on the album is called Dirty Rain. The song is well written, with a catchy phrase and one can almost hear the call and answer in Adam's head as he sings it. The album ends with the same song in a different sound. Adams makes comparisons through many last times and now. A good song.

The title track and the song after it Come Home are keepers. The album is a rainy Sunday afternoon album. A Monday afternoon with the snow falling and your girlfriend having just left you. This album will not make you stomp, it will make you shuffle. It is a pondering album.

Perhaps the best song on the album is I Love You But I Don't Know What to Say. This is a feeling many of us have had many times. All in all this album is good but as our friend Simon Cowell says I am not sure there is anything to remember in it. Having listened to it on Spotify if I now had to purchase it to listen to it again I would decline to do so.

That, in itself, might be the best measure of the album. Ryan Adams is married and happy and to a certain extent seems to be going down a path he has worn well. Maybe he needs to go out into the brambles and bushes on his next effort.