Ryan Adams is considered by many to be the king of alternative country.  He rose from the ashes of his ground breaking band Whiskeytown to become one of America’s most infamous troubadours.  In a world where songwriters such as Rhett Miller, Jeff Tweedy, and Jay Farrar were his contemporaries, Adams managed still to craft a unique and genuine voice.  His earliest solo records were continuations of the earnest, desperate songwriting he had crafted as the leader of Whiskeytown.  Suicide Handbook came about in 2001, a sort of side project to his own solo career, when the singer was finally beginning to peak.  And while it looks as though his label Lost Highway intends to include this in some kind of career spanning box set, they kept it on the shelves for a long time.

This is my first exposure to Suicide Handbook, even though it’s been available as a bootleg for quite some time.  And after listening through both discs twice now, I can honestly say this is the moment when Ryan Adams jumped the shark.  Adams claims that this collection of songs was his way of coping with a terrible breakup.  Well, judging from the sound of it, he couldn’t have cared about the girl very much.  The same hipster cowboy quality of Adams’ songwriting is evident in these recordings, but it’s easy to miss, considering how utterly forgettable each song here is.  There are moments, like on the song Cracks in a Photograph (“…tell her Elvis is cool, but the Rolling Stones will sweep her away”) where that poetry almost reaches through the miasma and grips the listener, but the easy listening pace and damnable similarity of the songs always ruins those chances.  I’ve had my heart broken before, and the pain and anger and confusion I felt gave birth to beautiful, passionate art.  I poured all that betrayal, all that doubt, all that desperation into my brain and let it spill out all over everything creative I touched.  Suicide Handbook doesn’t sound like the testament of a man who’s just had his heart broken, it sounds like the testament of a man who just found out the dry cleaner couldn’t get that mustard stain out of his favorite shirt.

When given a serious listen, Suicide Handbook sounds more like James Taylor than Gram Parsons, more like the Eagles than the Flying Burrito Brothers.  The record never takes the kid gloves off, never cries and screams and pounds the walls in anger, never goes on a bender to wake up two days later in a stranger’s bed with the name of broken love still on its lips.  It just coasts, the way someone might do in a relationship that’s comfortable, but by no means passionate.

But that’s not the album’s only transgression.  Suicide Handbook marks the moment when Ryan Adams began to become so self-involved that he couldn’t see when to just stop.  Now his albums feel a lot more like watching your favorite movie ruined by a terrible “director’s cut” than a revelation of great songwriting and honest, passionate music.  At the time, maybe he felt this was too deeply personal to be released, or maybe he was still capable of deciding when something wasn’t as good as it could be.  I’ve thought in recent years that if he would just have held back some of his songs, not been so overzealous with the releases, that he could have crafted some beautiful albums.  Suicide Handbook, with a proper editorial hand, could have been one of those albums.  Instead, it was a harbinger of things to come.  Let’s hope that Easy Tiger, Adams latest record, will mark a return to his old form.

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