It was way back at Song of the Day #2 that I last featured Ryan Adams on this blog. I’ve written about 276 songs since then, and I believe Adams has recorded that many during the same span.
And now we meet again, and I’m featuring another song from the same album I highlighted back then. Adams is perhaps the most prolific songwriter working today but I can’t get past those first two albums, Heartbreaker and Gold, which contain more than enough genius to go around.
Adams recently married Mandy Moore — bright, sunny Mandy Moore — which is kind of funny considering how messed up he comes across in his songs. He once dated Winona Ryder (as have most rock stars) and that seems a better fit.
I have a recurring thought that came to me once during an Academy Awards telecast… Stevie Wonder has no idea what Jack Nicholson looks like. I’m not sure why that rather obvious and trite concept struck me with such force. 
Across the Universe is simultaneously one of the most unjustly maligned and disproportionally worshiped movies in recent history. It was largely panned by critics who found it corny, earnest and shallow… and it is the favorite film of hordes of mostly teenage fans who find it the pinnacle of romance.
After choosing ‘
Just like I missed out on the 2007 summer hit ‘Umbrella’ and discovered Rihanna about a year and a half after the fact, somehow Estelle’s ‘American Boy’ passed me by in the summer of 2008. I guess this is what I get for not listening to the radio (or, as is often the case now, listening to fruity XM stations like ‘The Coffee House’ that play the same alterna-safe artists in constant rotation).
