Granary Wharf is indeed very lovely. So far, it seems to be doing better than most at shaking off the inevitable feeling of artifice that comes with extensive regeneration and the endless canyons of plate-glass that tend to accompany it, perhaps because the wharf itself, the actual dock, has been left mostly untouched. The stonework is uneven, worn, and rather lovely in the evening sunlight. It stlil looks more like an architect’s drawing than anyone’s home, mind.

You can eat, drink and admire the view in the shadow of Bridgewater Place, better known to taxi drivers, locals and Whovians as The Dalek. I happen to rather like the Dalek. You can see it as you come into the city, rising into the sky like the funnel of a lost ocean liner with its colour-changing lights and saying “Look at me!” It makes for a skyline to be reckoned with.

As I wandered though, I worried. The legacy of Clarence Dock looms large over each new stretch of waterfront regeneration. Another ghost town in waiting? The slums of the future? I think of the city centre as pizza dough in mid-air (bear with me here, people!); you can only tug it so far in every direction before you either run out of dough or tear a hole in the middle. Clarence Dock is too far out, and the city centre can’t stretch that far without cheap, fast transport links that don’t currently exist. Trinity Leeds, on the other hand, will tear a hole somewhere else, because the city just can’t support that much square footage of retail space. Something has to give.

I’m not convinced by the housing either; yet more flats that aspire to be called apartments and will inevitably mean that the older, less attractive, less well-marketed blocks elsewhere will struggle for tenants. The services aren’t there; sure, I’d love to live there now, but at the first sign of a partner/child, I’d be off. I wonder how many people making the kind of money you need to live there actually want to live so close to the station you can hear the announcements, right on top of a tapas bar.

I’ve long thought that we’ve raised a generation to believe that everyone lives in New York. It’s worse than that; we’ve raised a generation that believes everyone lives on sets in the Hollywood hills that look a bit like New York but have six times the square footage and no fourth wall. Thanks a bunch, Friends.

Places are shaped by technology, and America looks the way it does because of the railroad and the car, New York because of the invention of steel-reinforced concrete. I can’t help but think that Leeds (and indeed Manchester, Birmingham and Cardiff) are being shaped by TV and the internet, by the unbridled, self-aggrandising confidence of Generation Y and their desire to live like they are extras on How I Met Your Mother.

A note: Prompted by the time of year, I dug this out of my drafts folder and finished it. 90% of it was written a while ago, but I smoothed the rough edges and added a little perspective gained with the benefit of time to reflect further. Great book. If anyone has read Brightness Falls and not read The Good Life, they should do so. Read it anyway, even if you haven’t. Hell, read both!

SPOILERS: I’ve done my best to keep this spoiler-light and have deliberately avoided a detailed discussion of the ending for those who haven’t read The Good Life, in the hope that reading this might encourage exactly that. Nevertheless, I can’t guarantee that you won’t pick up some plot points that you would rather not have done.

I am a completist. I don’t deny it. It’s hard to do so to anyone who knows my bookshelves, CD racks or iPod, laden as they are with late-period mediocrities by once-great artists. I once owned every single recorded note Joni Mitchell ever produced, when anyone will tell you that you should stop at Hejira for your own good, thereby saving yourself the best part of a day of enduring her descent into jazzy irrelevance. I did the same thing with Springsteen, although that line is harder to draw, more of a rollercoaster than a one-way ticket. I do it with books, too, ploughing manfully on in the face of the critical gatekeeper’s unheeded cries. “Don’t bother!” they say. “He never bettered the one you’ve already read!” Fie, I say.

The latest beneficiary of this excess of faith in dwindling artistic output is Jay McInerney. McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis are, it seems, irrevocably tied together and, having now read Ellis’s entire oeuvre, it seemed only fair to move on to McInerney. Bonded by more than just the Literary Brat Pack label of the 1980s, the two are apparently good friends. However, whilst Ellis can still stop traffic with the launch of a new novel (I should know, I attended the London leg of the Imperial Bedrooms tour), McInerney seems to me to have drifted into relative obscurity (to the point where I was able to pick up more or less his entire published works for £2 or £3 a pop at my local FOPP) and a wine column for the WSJ. As you may have gathered from a previous entry, I struggle to grasp why McInerney is considered a middle-aged mediocrity whilst Ellis’s every tweet sets the twitterati a-flutter.

Like all New Yorkers, Ellis and McInerney were connected by the events of September 11th 2001. McInerney’s initial response to those events was published at the time by The Guardian, and makes fascinating reading. He visits his friend Bret and they try, and inevitably fail, to make sense of what is unfolding in front of them.

5 years later, McInerney produced a fictionalised response to 9/11 in the form of The Good Life. Nominally a sequel to Brightness Falls, it shares little except a core of characters, and even then there’s plenty of new ones added to the mix.

Russell and Corinne Calloway are probably McInerney’s most likeable protagonists. Like most of them, they are white and wealthy. Unlike almost all of them, and indeed most of their friends, Russ and Corinne feel guilt about this from time to time. Guilt is a core theme of the book, focusing as it does on the extramarital exploits of Corinne and her newfound friend Luke. Luke stumbles out of the dust cloud on “Ash Wednesday” September 12th 2001, having been clawing his way through the rubble with his bare hands looking for a friend he was supposed to have met at the WTC the previous, fateful, morning. He changed the time, cheated death and is wracked with survivor’s guilt because his friend didn’t get the message, arrived at 8am and is now buried in the rubble. In this state, he sees Corinne, and in the same moment falls for her.We are probably not supposed to find this terribly surprising; trauma, a heady cocktail of guilt and euphoria at being alive, a faithless wife and a beautiful new woman arriving in his life, stepping out of the dust like an angelic apparition. None of what follows quite manages to tarnish the beauty of this moment.

Luke’s 14-year-old daughter Ashley reacts to the attacks by slipping further down what we are lead to believe has been a long-term descent into a prescription drug habit, underage sex and depression. She runs away from rehab to her grandmother’s (Luke’s mother’s) house in rural Nashville, where Luke follows. His arrival is one of the most elegant moments of prose in the novel, encapsulating just how much of an intellectual McInerney’s narrator is:

The dogs announced his arrival – three adopted strays who met him halfway up the gravel drive and escorted him to the house, [...] the farmhouse, dating from the lean years after the war, stopped short of any pretensions to plantationhood. [...] its simple lines and gables closer to the architectural vernacular of rural New England than to the Greco-Georgian vocabulary of the landed southern gentry.

There, conveniently for the narrative, Luke is able to work out precisely the issues that are threatening to stifle his burgeoning relationship with Corinne. His mother’s approval secured and Ashley’s recovery seemingly aided by fresh air, home cooking and horse-riding, they return to the city and attempt to play happy families once more.

McInerney’s true stroke of genius is to make the structure of the narrative match its subject matter. “Jim” is anonymous, the distant friend-of-a-friend caught in the towers that everyone must have known in the wake of 9/11.  Characters swim in and out of focus, drift into and out of the narrative without ever really becoming clear, but the effect is to disorientate the reader. I’ll credit the author with creating the sense of disorientation on purpose, to reflect what’s going on in his protagonists’ heads.

Lesser writers have churned out these tired cliches and produced the kind of bad fiction that lines the shelves of airport branches of bookshop chains. That McInerney can take “grasping, skinny social climber wife”, “pretty teen daughter who experiments with sex and drugs” and “investment banker seeking more meaningful way to fill his days” and come up with three-dimensional characters is testament to his considerable prowess.We root for them, wish that they could somehow be together, envy their weekend away on Nantucket. We give a fuck about characters around whom a world is being built and destroyed, remade in the weeks following 9/11.

I was struck by one particular similarity between The Good Life and Bright Lights, Big City. For all that they share very little (Good Life is longer, more bloated, more conventional and considerably less innovative in terms of narrative technique or literary devices), once again, McInerney has crafted a beautiful, shocking, powerful denouement that reverberates far beyond its relatively brief confines. In a few short pages at the very end of the novel, his protagonists’ moral compasses swing back on course. It’s sad, touching and at least a little unexpected. Once again, McInerney has created a protagonist who leans into the abyss of tragedy but pulls back, conquers (or at least subdues) his flaws and makes a decision to change the way he leads his life.

If Jay McInerney ever gets tired of writing about rich white Manhattanites or wine, he could do worse than write self-help books. Alternatively, if rich white Manhattanites ever get sick of reading self-help books, they could do worse than read some McInerney novels; they just might find in them a reflection of the kind of person they could be.

I was in the air when the towers came down
In a bar on the 84th floor
I bought Philippe Petit a round
And asked what his high wire was for
He said, “I put one foot on the wire,
One foot straight into heaven”
As the prophets entered boldly into the bar
On the Boeing 737, Lord, on the Boeing 737
Hey little bird, would you be the one
To nest beneath my Gatling gun?
There’s nothing left I call my own
Come down and build me a home.

I was in a bar when they rigged the towers
Trying to leave all my sins
The barmaid asked my order
And where my mind had been
I tried to recall the high wire
Philippe and his foot in heaven
As the prophets entered boldly into the bar
On the Boeing 737, Lord, on the Boeing 737
Hey little bird, would you be the one
To nest beneath my Gatling gun?
There’s nothing left I call my own
Come down and build me a home.

The Low Anthem’s last album, Smart Flesh, is well worth your attention. This track in particular is one of the most glorious, articulate, intelligent responses to the events of 11 years ago I have heard.

With each passing year, the memories fade a little. With each passing day, Freedom Tower rises a little further towards its eventual 1776 ft height. Each September 11th, we are all New Yorkers for a moment.

11.9.01
In Memoriam

The escalator down to the platforms was deserted. Ascending on the other side, however, was a substantial crowd. The contrast between the rush of people coming up and his solitude made him self-conscious, standing still, leaning on the handrail, wanting to dash down the left hand side but having no-one to impress by doing so. He stood and tried to find somewhere to rest his eyes that wasn’t a poster for a West End show or the onrushing stream of humanity climbing upwards, out into the light.

Stepping off the escalator, he heard a train moving, felt the rush of diesel-stained air. He turned left and ran down the stairs two at a time, to discover that it was leaving. In the same moment, he saw a silhouette. Head cocked slightly in front of the map on the far wall of the tunnel, she seemed puzzled. There had been no-one in front of him on the escalator; she must have been there for at least a couple of minutes already.

He passed behind her and took up a place on the platform an appropriate distance away, just far enough to seem anonymous, yet just close enough that if, as he predicted, she sought advice, it would be his to give.

In the event it took a couple of minutes, although whether this was because she struggled and gave up trying to understand the map herself or rather that she was working up the courage to admit her failure, he couldn’t say.

“How do I get onto the half… to London Bridge?” she asked him, in halting, accented but precise English.

Short, no more than five-two, she was wearing a long-sleeved black top made from a stretchy fabric that accentuated her slender waist. She’d paired this with a pale blue denim miniskirt, black tights, patent black pumps. The effect, combined with her black bob and pale, freckled skin, served to frame her eyes. They were brown and fringed with lashes like a peacock’s, impossibly dense.

He explained as best he could how the Bank branch of the Northern Line worked. He was stymied by the paranoia that grips native speakers when speaking to extraordinarily beautiful strangers from exotic climes, fighting the tongue-tied feeling and trying to use simple phrases and speak clearly all at once, thus achieving precisely none of those things. Eventually he managed to point out that she could catch the ones marked “Morden via Bank”. As he was doing so, it occurred to him that he was about to do exactly that himself, to get to St Pancras, so he followed up with an invitation to show her next time one of these trains arrived.

They talked, asked what each was doing in London, where they’d come from. She lived in Sevenoaks, was visiting a couple of friends, going to meet the second of these at London Bridge. He told her he’d been to a concert last night and was about to catch a train home to the Midlands. She had never heard of the Civil Wars, or the London Borough of Islington for that matter, and only grasped where Nottingham was after an extended description of Robin Hood complete with mimed bow-and-arrow action. None of this seemed to matter very much, somehow.

The train arrived, doors rattled open and he indicated that this was the one to catch. They stepped on together and took up a position by the door, most of the seats already occupied with people coming in from Finchley. They held the pole for support, standing in silence, obeying the unspoken rule that you do not talk on the Tube.

They stood, bisected by the bright yellow vertical, each finding places to look. From Kentish Town to Camden Town, Euston (Bank Branch) and then King’s Cross St Pancras, they stared into space, flicking their eyes at each other every few seconds. This reverie continued, each glance more laden with meaning. He pondered the impossibility of the moment, a list of things he could never do that included staying on till London Bridge to “show her the way”, handing her his card as he left or slipping his hand down the support until it met hers, looking into her eyes and trying to explain to her just what an effect she was having on his morning.

As the train pulled into King’s Cross a seat became available and she took it. He stepped off, looked back, smiled. She waved. He walked, climbed the stairs, two escalators, swiped his Oyster Card through the barrier and walked out onto the concourse. He raised his eyes to Betjeman’s “shadowless, unclouded glare”. Already, she was fading to caricature, smeared memories more blurry every time he tried to recall her face.

Go, read, and then have a look around. Ryan and co are doing something rather special over there, and it remains an undiluted pleasure to count myself a small part of it.

Albums

Counting Crows – August and Everything After: Live at Town Hall

In a move deeply predictable to those who know me, I think a Counting Crows album is the best release of the year. I’m cheating on at least two counts here, firstly because it’s a DVD, and secondly because it contains no new music. In fairness, it is also a CD/download album, but its well worth getting the DVD. Town Hall is beautiful, the lighting designer needs a medal, and Adam Duritz is still a be-dreadlocked whirling dervish of a frontman. He’ll never be particularly cool, but in 1993 he wrote some beautiful songs and in 2007 he performed them in front of some cameras. That’s really all there is to it.

June Tabor & Oysterband – Ragged Kingdom

It was a good year for reunited folk-rock colossi, and Shrewsbury Folk Festival had them both. But then they would, and this is why we love them. I saw a full set by June and the band in Nottingham in November, a gig marred by some of the worst live sound I’ve heard all year, but nonetheless a great night. Tabor’s voice ages like a fine wine, and the band are a more nuanced, delicate instrument than they were 20 years ago when they made Freedom and Rain. Their choice of material is eclectic but brilliant, and the result is an album garnering award nominations.

Graham Colton – Pacific Coast Eyes

The first four tracks of Pacific Coast Eyes are pure summer pop perfection. It’s not that the rest are bad, just that the  first four are inspired,dovetailing beautifully into a little song-cycle of unrequited longing, nostalgia and sunglasses. It also features the runner-up in my Best Sappy/Cute Lyric of the Year Award, narrowly pipped by Teddy Thompson (see below):

You weren’t standing with who you came with,
You told me your name, it was short for Elizabeth.
You don’t drink cos you can’t stand the taste,
You talk like a boy but you still like a little chase.

(As an aside, the fact that people have started writing nostalgic premature-midlife-crisis songs about being born in the 1980s (see below) is making em feel dangerously grown up.)

File away until the sun comes out again, then roll down the windows and enjoy.

Ryan Adams – Ashes & Fire

Lucky Now is beautiful. Musically it wouldn’t stand out if you dropped it into the middle of his first album, but lyrically it has real immediacy. It is a song of sober, 2011-vintage Adams looking ruefully back. It’s also a song of New York. The rest isn’t quite as lovely, but nonetheless a worthy addition to Adams’ substantial discography.

The Civil Wars – Barton Hollow

Suffers in comparison to their live performance only because they appear to accomplish more with less. Their vocal performances have grown since they made this record, and most of the overdubs don’t bring much to the party. If you can, see them live. I’ve got tickets to see them in Leeds in March, and there are still tickets for some of the tour dates at the time of writing. That said, this is still a pretty remarkable clutch of songs.

Wilco – The Whole Love

Continuing Wilco’s slide towards middle-aged mediocrity, or the best instalment yet of their third age? The Whole Love has convinced me that Wilco are alive, well and maturing like a fine wine. Those of us who had our concerns around the time Sky Blue Sky emerged and were only partly assuaged by Wilco (the album).

It reminds me a lot of REM’s Automatic for the People. There are string arrangements and Wurlitzer electric piano textures. There’s also a sense that the best has probably passed by now, as has any sense of trendsetting or avantgarde, but that none of that really matters. It’s good stuff, it’s very Wilco and it has none of the hesitancy or laid-back laziness that at times killed Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (the album). It’s the first album on their own label, dBpm, and between that and their own festival (SolidSound) they’re fast turning into a cottage industry. Try the first track, below, and revel in the wonderfully bipolar nature of Wilco in 2011, swinging from weird, ambient noisemaking to glorious Nels Cline guitar solos via Jeff Tweedy’s driving, sinister verses. Long live Wilco!

Blitzen Trapper – American Goldwing

Glorious retro-fest filtered through 21st century indie rock sound. It’s the Rolling Stones via the Black Crowes with Eagles harmonies as played by the bastard offspring of Band of Horses and Wilco, and it makes me grin like an idiot. This record has so much groove it’s ridiculous. I tried telling someone it sounded a lot like T.Rex and Led Zeppelin, and they looked at me like I’d gone mad. Had I continued and told them that there are hints of early Elton John or early Bowie in “Astronaut”, I have no doubt they would have asked me to stop flaying their sacred cows and leave. It’s true though; “Street Fighting Sun” is pure Zep, “Your Crying Eyes” is Bowie’s Suffragette City for a new generation. Is it original? Not terribly. Is it fun? Hugely. Is it bizarrely cool this year? Apparently so. And, thanks to the benelovent indie god that is SubPop, you can listen to whole thing for nothing on YouTube (below). Do so, then decide you’re going to buy a copy anyway.

Teddy Thompson – Bella

Deserves a place on this list simply for the line

I guess it’s good loving that I want the most
Someone who turns my bread into buttered toast

but would qualify anyway, with a slew of catchy melodies and clever lyrics like this. Teddy’s voice gets better with every passing year, as does his sense of a good pop song. I have the feeling he’s building towards a truly brilliant album at some point, but until then this is a very, very good one. If you can, see him live, especially if it’s just him and a guitar in a cathedral.

The Wailin’ Jennys – Bright Morning Stars

More than ever before the Jennys are pulling in three disparate directions. David Travers-Smith produces once again, but there’s too much slow, jazzy contemplation. Opening track Swing Low, Sail High is gorgeous, but the good vibes dissipate quickly and leave behind a disparate, patchy collection of songs. Lovely in places, but I haven’t bonded with in the way I did with Firecracker.

Gillian Welch – Harrow and the Harvest

Eight years is so long to wait for an album that it’s almost impossible for it to meet with expectation. Not bad by any stretch, but part of a trend towards inconsistency that started with Soul Journey. That said, if your decline starts with Time (The Revelator), there’s a lot of room to make good music on the way. Revelator is desert island stuff for me, and probably something of a miraculous one-off even by the high standards of Welch and Rawlings.  The Harrow and the Harvest is good, great in places, but dull in others. At its best, you believe every word Welch sings, and yearn to sing along, to join the tales of lonesome souls. David Rawlings is still a genius, his guitar parts and vocal harmonies top notch as ever.

Gemma Hayes – Let It Break

Not a bad album, but suffers from being compared to Hayes’ remarkable and underappreciated back catalogue. Her first album, the Mercury-nominated Night on my Side is gorgeous and her third, The Hollow of Morning, is a delicate, harrowing collection that still transports me to a transcendent set at the Bodega in Nottingham whenever I hear it. I played it nine times the following day; I doubt I’ve played Let It Break nine times since I got it.

OK, so that’s albums. Tomorrow, good gigs I went to, EPs and assorted other musical things that aren’t full-length albums and a few thoughts for 2012.

A new venue is always cause for celebration, albeit sometimes with caution. The Navigation is a pub by the canal and isn’t really new at all, but is under new management and they’re booking music. They’re also playing host to what smelled like a pretty remarkable burger-making operation. Note to self: next time, don’t bother having dinner before you go.

It’s probably a good thing I can’t remember the name of the first act, a local support, because his Jeff Buckley impression was so painstakingly, studiously crafted that to watch it fall so inevitably short was really quite uncomfortable to watch. It should be obvious to anyone that it’s a futile thing to attempt, but it’s also about 15 years late.

Moving swiftly on, the first two proper acts up was Paul Thomas Saunders. By way of a disclaimer, or at least some background, I should say that I’ve known Paul a long time. We went to school together for a while, and he was in the better of the two teenage rock bands that formed around that time. We played at some of the same gigs. I then had the good fortune to end up in Leeds at the time his previous band reached their peak. It could be said I’m fairly au fait with his oeuvre, if you’ll excuse the rampant francophony of that sentence.

With that taken into account, it’s all the more astonishing that he managed to deliver a set that was at once surprising and familiar to me. Above all it was impressive. During songs Paul and band oozed confidence, overcoming the challenge of the sound, not to mention a few talkative audience members, to deliver their carefully crafted slices of ethereal pop.

Paul has assembled a stellar band of sonic magicians. A guitarist who plays his effects pedals like another instrument, layering textures and fading chords into complex walls of delay, aided by keyboardist Kate’s Wurlitzer chords and strong backing vocals. Long-time drummer Ali leant power and poise to the arrangements, giving them huge dynamic range.

With this trio behind him, Paul is free to sing, something he is really rather good at. His vocal range is huge, extended by a smooth, powerful falsetto that lends itself to the dreamy, echo-drenched songs that populate his set, typified by Appointment in Samarra, below.

The Staves

Our headliners took the stage around 9pm.

I first encountered The Staves supporting The Civil Wars at the Union Chapel Islington in September. I wrote at the time that

Given the unreserved seating at the Union Chapel I was never going to dawdle on my way to the Northern Line but when a music journalist friend said that The Staves were “the best new band in the country”, I made doubly sure I was there on time. Hundreds of people were queueing round the block at 7pm, and we were not disappointed. The Staves, a trio of sisters, appear to have taken the ethereal close harmony stylings of Fleet Foxes and done something distinctly English with them. Stunningly precise and accurate singing, charmingly humble chat and elegant writing. Their debut album, produced by Ethan Johns, is out on Atlantic early next year. I’ll be queueing up.

In essence, not a great deal has changed since then. With no Grade I-listed venue to add gravitas and reverb, it wasn’t as dramatic a performance. Instead, we were treated to an intimate show with plenty of chat.

The Staves are Camilla, Jessica and Emily, sisters from Watford. Conveniently blessed with complementary vocal ranges, they sing in close harmony, accompanied by Jessica’s simple-but-effective Paul Simon-like fingerpicked guitar.

Whilst on first listen they belong somewhere in the Fleet Foxes/Midlake/Low Anthem ballpark, seeing them live reveals that they’ve taken these ethereal close-harmony stylings and done something distinctly English with them. Unlike the Mumford/Marling-type response to that particular US nu-folk pack, they’ve done something that appears both genuine and natural, powerful but never forced. They are wise old heads on young shoulders, and if you’re ready to spot them you can hear the influence of Simon & Garfunkel or Crosby, Stills & Nash in their harmonies and Joni Mitchell in their phrasing. They sing with an awareness of the power they wield, more knowing than naive.

They also sing with astonishing precision, seemingly able to start and stop singing together, moving from solos or duets to full three-part harmony without cues, snapping suddenly into unison for a line before  swooping gloriously back into lush, full harmony again.

Their Mexico EP is out on December 11th:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/preorder/mexico/id485033701?i=485033705

http://www.amazon.com/Mexico-EP/dp/B006BZ8442/

Their debut album, the first ever collaboration between father and son producers Glyn and Ethan Johns, is out on Atlantic early next year.

They support The Civil Wars on tour in the US in January 2012, followed by more UK dates in February in support of Michael Kiwinuka.

Lastly, I’d like to point out that I managed to write an entire piece about them without once mentioning cunnilingus. Unlike the Guardian.

Prompted by answering a couple of questions about the sounds on Ghosts & Heroes (no, seriously, people ask these things!), I thought I’d write a short piece on the guitar that did most of the heavy lifting in those sessions. Some of this is going to be a little heavy on the guitar-geekery, but I’ll do my best to keep it interesting for a broader audience.

There are many things to love about my favourite electric guitar, a 1998 Godin SD. It is beautiful. It is, I believe, a unique and clever hybrid. There aren’t many of them on this side of the Atlantic. It was also a screaming bargain on eBay, which always helps.

Why Godin guitars are so relatively affordable is hard to understand; they’re all made in Canada (with the exception of some of their electrics, like this one, which are assembled over the border in the US state of New Hampshire from Canadian timber for reasons that I suspect have to do with minimum wage laws/healthcare/dental plans). They depreciate significantly, because they’re not Gibsons or Fenders, I suppose. The loss of the crowd-following types is the gain of those of us in the know!

This one is nicer than your average SD for a couple of reasons, first and foremost the Seymour Duncan Custom Custom pickup that the previous owner had the good sense to install at some point in the first decade of its life.

One of the most remarkable things about my SD in particular is that it was made within a month of its stablemate, my Gordon-Smith GS1 (of which more later, perhaps), in 1998.  I was 10 years old and had scarcely touched a guitar, but in two places thousands of miles apart within a few weeks of each other, two guitars were made that would eventually find their way to me.

What led me to start looking for one in the first place was a gentle curiosity for all things Stratocaster-shaped culminating in a blinding epiphany when borrowing a friend’s Strat when sitting in for one song at their gig (in the Packhorse in Leeds, for those keeping score).

Technical language warning! Stratocasters have three pickups and a five-way switch. Why five-way? I hear you cry, when there are only three options? Because, my curious friend, positions two and four on this switch select the middle pickup with either the neck or bridge pickup in parallel. On my Godin, position 4 is half single-coil middle pickup, half humbucker bridge pickup, which further adds to the sonic alchemy going on . It is these in-between settings that give the likes of Richard Thompson and Mark Knopfler their distinctive Strat sounds. On said night, I suddenly realised that these in-between settings reveal details in your right-hand pick/finger attack that are otherwise inaudible, and make really, really cool sounds in the process. I grew up a little as a guitarist right then and there.

Why not get a Strat then? Read on!

Those of us raised in the late 90s and early 00s are scarred by the presence of millions of cheap Chinese Stratocaster copies, and I think it puts a lot of people off the notion. I’d count myself among that number; it’s tough to shake off the image of every beginner guitarist you’ve ever known struggling to play an F chord on their plasticky Strat copy. Even proper, nice Stratocasters are a bit, well, bland for some of us. By the time you’ve specified an attractive translucent finish and a humbucker at the bridge, you might as well sort all the other things you don’t really care for at the same time…

Enter, then, a hybrid. The SD has the bridge and pickups of a Strat grafted onto the curvaceous body that is Godin’s signature. It is, if such a thing is possible, a refinement of a classic. It ditches the just-plain-irritating (and also ugly) top-mounted jack plate, the too-close-to-the-strings volume knob placement and instead opts for a side-mounted jack and global tone and volume controls, decluttering the top. It is further hybridised by having a 24 ¾ “ scale (the measurement between the bridge and the nut). This makes it like Gibsons and almost every steel-strung acoustic guitar in the world. This is a Good Thing for those of us who grew up playing guitars of that scale and never really enjoyed adapting to Fender’s 25 ½” malarky. Combined with the skinny-but-not-too-skinny rock maple neck, it makes for an easy, smooth playing experience (that is, once you’ve taken some steel wool to the gloss finish on the back of the neck…sticky!).

It’s a compromise, of course. You no longer look like Hank Marvin, Buddy Holly or Eric Clapton. You might, however, look like your own man.

You retain, crucially, the in-between-pickups sounds. With a maple neck and a traditional Strat-style sprung vibrato bridge, it covers most of the sonic territory of a Strat with ease. With the Seymour Duncan humbucker replacing the factory one in the bridge position, this particular one has an authentic rock voice as well.

It plays something of a starring role on Ghosts & Heroes, mostly through a Vox AC15 surrounded by a small forest of microphones that included Sennheiser e906 and MD918U and an AKG C414.

I’m going to put my inner guitar geek away now, but if anyone finds this remotely interesting I could talk about amps and mics, the aforementioned Gordon Smith, a couple of basses… GuitarGeekery Chapter 2, perhaps? Leave a comment and let me know.

So, PR-driven sobriety narrative aside, is it a good album? If his prolific tendency has taught us one thing it is not to expect a gem every time. For every Cold Roses there’s a Jacksonville City Nights, for every Love is Hell a Rock N Roll. And of course, for every actual album there’s a comedy black metal album about alien invasion. No, really.

It opens with “Dirty Rain”. If you were to play the game of trying to fit this into said back catalogue, this one belongs on Gold. It quickly becomes clear that Benmont Tench (borrowed from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) is not here to make up the numbers or add a recognisable credit to the sleeve; rather, Johns has him playing a lovely retro Hammond organ part. The soulful vocal seems to belong on side two of Gold as well. So far, so good, if not exactly revolutionary.

The title track follows, and captures a joyous mood rarely seen on his albums of late. A jaunty waltz-time and a Gram Parsons-esque delivery make it rare if not unique in his canon, but whether either were a good move remains to be seen. Perhaps we ought not to wish for too much reinvention of the wheel here. I think I prefer the acoustic solo version he put on YouTube before the album came out, which has a certain authenticity and purity that the album version lacks. Suck it and see.

“Come Home” is more like Heartbreaker than anything else. Pedal steel, gently shuffling snare, a longing lyric that seems to promise the safety and security that Heartbreaker spent most of its time looking for. I’m not the first to point out the connection. Produced by Glyn Johns (Beatles, Stones, The Who, Eagles and, notably, father of Ethan Johns who produced Heartbreaker and Gold), there are moments that could slip unnoticed onto the inevitable deluxe edition of Adams’ solo debut a decade ago. “Rocks” is another of them, delicate, fragile and sweet.

There are glimpses of irresistible, melodic Ryan we saw on Cold Roses; “Chains of Love” betrays his love of Noel Gallagher’s best songs, if Noel had come from Jacksonville, NC, that is. “Kindness” has that Harvest groove that so much of Heartbreaker used so well, helped along by Tench’s piano.

Other bits drift past with no discernable hook; “Save Me” makes no impact whatsoever and “I Love You But I Don’t Know What To Say” makes me recoil. Your mileage may vary depending on your susceptibility to cute, or indeed to Adams songs with long, unwieldy, narrative titles (“Elizabeth, You Were Born To Play That Part” anyone? “I Taught Myself How To Grow Old”?).

By this point, you’re not sure what to make of it. For an album with a fairly consistent sound, it is nonetheless all over the place in terms of style, delivery and influences. Just as well, then, that “Lucky Now” comes along.

The dedicated/obsessed have been listening to it for weeks now, but “Lucky Now” remains a glorious piece of pop perfection. I expect it may remain so for a while yet. Even Ryan Adams albums you don’t particularly like usually have one song where he hits it well and truly out of the park; “Dear Chicago” on Demolition or the title track of Rock N Roll. This is that one, destined to show up in encores years from now, already careering with tragic inevitability towards a million iTunes playlists.

I get the same sense of compact, to-the-point poppy efficiency I got the first time I heard Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark”. It gets in, delivers its beautifully-weighted point and gets out again. The music geek in me revels in the simplicity of the IV-vi in the chorus that drives home the first and third lines:

And the lights will draw you in
And the dark will take you down
And the night will break your heart
Only if you’re lucky now

In the end, the album is encapsulated in the change between the second and final choruses, when the lyric becomes:

And if the lights draw you in
And the dark can take you down
And love can mend your heart
But only if you’re lucky now

Stop press, Ryan Adams believes in love. Probably. If you’re lucky. Perhaps it’s a reflection on the fragility of the place he finds himself, an expression of the fear that it might all disappear with the same roll of the dice that he thinks brought it along in the first place.

At this point in his career, Adams doesn’t need to, nor could he, try to encapsulate his entire career in one album. This isn’t definitive, nor is it his best album, but it’s a stop on a long road. It won’t change the world, or even the world’s perception of him. It won’t get more than a track or two onto my Best Of Ryan Adams playlist either, but at this point that’s probably about all we could reasonably expect.

===========

Ashes & Fire is streaming at Ryan’s Smashing Life, where you can read Chris Fullerton’s take on it and make your own mind up.