book review: Ryan Adams - Hello Sunshine

Pain can be the best fuel for art. The sweet bitterness of being lonesome translates well into both poetry and music. Ryan Adams’ phenomenal discography and debut book of poetry (Infinity Blues) exemplify this well.

Call me a single cynic, but one of my biggest pet peeves is when people you are close to fall in love. The same friends who used to join you in deploring the ridiculousness of lovey dovey people turn their backs on you and join the others. The others.

Hello Sunshine is Ryan Adams’ second book, and it has neither the intensity nor the anguished honesty of Infinity Blues. It reads like a love letter to his wife. The contentment relayed in the pages is basically career suicide for his poet self. The sober Ryan Adams—the loving husband, the non-smoker, this Ryan Adams does not interest me.

The book has its moments. “Yes” is beautiful, “A colorful ending” is vivid and lucid, and “Fruit Rotting” strikes close to the poems found in Infinity Blues. I will admit that the poems are written with the unapologetic flourish that embodies so much of why I love Ryan Adam's work. The stream of consciousness which was definitely typed up once and not edited. The purity of form. But the substance is all wrong, and all in all, the book was a disappointment.

Adams self-mockingly writes “poets smoke/now/i am really screwed/i am not smoking/damnit”, but he ends the poem triumphantly, thinking that he can still craft good poetry in this state of newfound well-being. I beg to differ. Ryan, why have you forsaken me?

“quietly, I am happy now”?!

Give me recklessness. Give me youth. Don’t give me the precursor to your memoirs as a soccer dad.

I guess he’s forgotten his own wisdom, despite having taken copious notes thereof:
“note to self don't die for anyone. note to self, don't die. note to self, don’t change for anyone. note to self don't die.”

Ryan Adams - Note to Self: Don't Die [mp3]