Jacksonville City Nights

These Amazon sellers are unbelievably on the ball.

So I received Jacksonville City Nights on Wednesday, started listening to it yesterday, and love it.

The car is my music-listening studio; I make too much of a stink about the volume level of my fellow tenants' various electronic devices to feel comfortable playing anything in my apartment that isn't quiet (and in fact rule the "Shhh" atmosphere of the house with an unconscious iron fist -- all of my neighbors tell me, proudly, that they only play their music when I'm gone, and are careful to turn it down when my car pulls into the driveway. Sometimes I puzzle over how things came to that pass -- I've never complained to the landlord about them; the only neighbor I've bothered about his music is Jim, but I call him directly when it's too loud; but somehow the girls know I like it quiet, and respect it. It's funny). And I like my car stereo because I can hear everything, every tone and vibration and harmony, it surrounds me, and I can turn it up and blast away without worrying about bothering anyone else.

So. Jacksonville City Nights. I can't give a complete review, only a sketch, as I have yet to listen to the entire album, and that thoroughly; as with all albums I begin to love, I get stuck on one song and play it for a week or more, and right now that song is Dear John, which Ryan Adams sings in duet with Norah Jones. It's beyond incredible -- gut-wrenching, mostly quiet, sweet, raw. The vocals -- hitting five- or more-part harmony in the choral lines -- rip right through you with a penetrating power that leaves you almost too sick for tears, in a gorgeous way.

The album overall is Ryan Adams' alt-country, full of old-school twang and grit and steel guitar, but without the contemporary vapidness and too many drums and shallow lyrics and pointless predictable rhymes that I hate about the country you pick up on the radio. This has sorrow with soul, and no corn-meal mush. It's the kind of thing you'd expect from the 'way-back-when country artists, with updated dashes of jazz and flairs of modern life fanned in.

Thumbs up. I can't wait to get lost in the rest of the album.

(And I'm so glad to have this half-hour commute to work and this half-hour commute back home every day...it's so much enriched my listening experience. And something about these bluegrass/country indie artists, unfolding their tunes in my car as I drive across the Michigan fields and through the Michigan woods, does something to me. I don't know. But the Midwest is becoming more and more a place that I love, not just a place where I happen to live.)