Pitchfork

Seven full-lengths in five years...for fuck's sake, you could almost set your watch to Ryan Adams' release schedule. And it looks like the clock's about to strike half-past Adams again, as the scruffy ADD prince has another studio disc set to hit stores early this fall.

Following the well-received early 2005 release Cold Roses (which benefited exponentially from lack of hype), the prolific artist will issue his next solo LP, September, via Universal on September 27. The record, which previously bore the title Jacksonville City Nights will feature the following tracklist:

01 A Kiss Before I Go
02 The End
03 What Sin Replaces Love
04 Hard Way to Fall
05 Dear John (with Norah Jones)
06 The Hardest Part
07 Games
08 Silver Bullets
09 Peaceful Valley
10 September
11 My Heart Is Broken
12 Trains
13 Pa
14 Withering Heights
15 Don't Fail Me Now

Elaborating on September's reportedly ragged, countrified tone, Adams revealed the following to Pitchfork's Amanda Petrusich during an exclusive interview: "We used piano and violin and strings and stuff like that, almost Patsy Cline-type arrangements. But we didn't do it in an ironic way. I kept saying that I didn't want the sad songs to be sad, I wanted them to be angry, violent. I wanted the compositions to feel like your dad, or my dad, or anybody's dad who's from the south, went into an actual southern, honky-tonk bar, like Merle Haggard, knife-fight country. Not pretty, not gussied up." The album also features a track with everybody's favorite duet partner, Norah Jones, called "Dear John".

In related news, the denim-clad minstrel also has a small collection of North American live dates lined up this month to drum up support for September, including a stop at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. If there's ever a place to break out the Grateful Dead covers, it's there.

Current dates:

08-05 Sandpoint, ID - Festival at Sandpoint
08-07 Edmonton, Alberta - Gallagher Park (Edmonton Folk Music Festival)
08-09 Vancouver, British Columbia - Commodore Ballroom
08-10 Seattle, WA - Moore Theatre
08-11 Seattle, WA - Moore Theatre
08-12 Portland, OR - Crystal Ballroom
08-14 Oakland, CA - Paramount Theatre
08-16 Los Angeles, CA - The Wiltern LG
08-17 Los Angeles, CA - The Wiltern LG
08-20 San Diego, CA - Spreckels Theatre

And finally, in typical song-purging form, Ryan Adams will have at least one more album in stores this year. Currently titled 29, the effort was recorded in Los Angeles, and is tentatively set for release on a yet-to-be determined Tuesday this December. The singer (or one of his clones, maybe) also spoke at length to Pitchfork about what will be his third LP of 2005:

"It has nine songs," he explained. "And all the songs are nine minutes long, they're all story-songs. And it's basically just me and a piano, me and a guitar. The theme of it was that I wanted to write a record where I could write myself out of my twenties. So for each year of my life, in my twenties, I kind of assigned different parts of my character, I gave them names."

"The last song is a song from the perspective, believe it or not, of a ghost. When it's just passed out of a body, and it goes, "Don't go to the light/ I'll show you how to haunt." This spirit is trying to conjure this dead child, this dead person, back to the house where they died. So they can haunt it. It's really fucked up."

So basically, Ryan Adams' new album is the soundtrack to Ghostbusters 3.

* Ryan Adams: http://www.ryan-adams.com/