#42, “Jacksonville Skyline,” Whiskeytown (2001)

150 Favorite Songs: #42, “Jacksonville Skyline,” Whiskeytown (2001)

I can’t listen to Ryan Adams anymore. I’ve tried, sometimes, but it just doesn’t work for me. I had a really intense and personal connection to his music, especially those first two albums. I have had a good number of nights where I would listen to “La Cienga Just Smiled” or “Come Pick Me Up” or “Oh My Sweet Carolina” over and over again. Those songs felt like they were etched on me in a way that could never be removed. Then we learned about how Ryan Adams treated young women who believed he was interested in their music, and I just couldn’t feel the same way about those songs anymore. The connection I felt to them was just severed. When I would try to listen to “When the Stars Go Blue” or “My Winding Wheel,” I kept thinking about the fact that the price of that music is that who-knows-how-many musicians whose work could have been as meaningful to me as Phoebe Bridgers’s is might have put down their guitars and moved back home after they met Ryan Adams, thinking he liked their songs. It just didn’t mean anything to me. (I have a similar problem with Kanye West, whose music used to mean every bit as much to me as Adams’s.)

I’ve been able to hold on to Whiskeytown, though, even though Ryan Adams’s voice is on pretty much all of their songs, even though he wrote the vast majority of them. Because it’s a band, it’s not just him. You know? Caitlin Cary’s violin and vocals make those songs what they are, Mike Daly’s pedal steel guitar elevates them to something that Adams stopped being able to reliably achieve in his solo work by 2002 or so. I don’t know if being in Whiskeytown when he wrote the songs on his first two solo albums helped push him to write his best stuff, but I know that he was never that good again ever.

A band is more than just its singer or its primary songwriter, and Whiskeytown still means something to me. I think if I let Adams’s behavior tarnish those songs, it would be erasing Cary and Daly, and I don’t want to give Ryan Adams that much credit.

So, “Jacksonville Skyline.” The song is everything Adams did best when he was at his height, soulful vocals and personal songwriting that’s somewhere between believable and bullshit, what we can charitably refer to as “self-mythologizing.” And it’s really striking how the rest of the band makes that so much more believable. When he gets to the chorus, Cary joins him on the harmonies, and the presence of her voice provides affirmation, like it’s not just this guy who’s saying all of this about growing up in a hardscrabble hometown, that “the soldiers filled the hotels on the weekends” is really true. Daly’s pedal steel swirls through the whole song, and what he and Cary do together is remarkable; when the song gets to the third verse, and her violin punctuates every line he sings, it creates a mournful atmosphere that leads to what has always been my favorite vocal delivery from Adams, where he changes the first line of the chorus from “the soldiers filled the hotels on the weekends” to “I ended up a soldier on the weekend,” pausing just a minute before he sings the line to deliver an audible sigh, paying off all of the wide-open country atmosphere Cary and Daly created to capture the let-down of dreaming of getting out of your small town only to find yourself becoming one of the people who never did.

That’s not Adams’s story, of course—he never served in the National Guard, and got out of Jacksonville by the time he was twenty—but the way the band comes together on “Jacksonville Skyline” makes it believable, makes it more than just a song Ryan Adams wrote to make the streets of his hometown sound paved with despair. (Compare it with this solo performance from 2011 of Adams playing the song on Live on Letterman, and you might be able to tell the difference.)

Every band is a matter of alchemy that can’t really be duplicated. Jack White has played with far more skilled drummers than Meg White, but he never surpassed what he did with the White Stripes without her, because it’s not just about who plays well, it’s about how you play together. The guys in At The Drive-In have often hated one another, but when the band reunited without Jim Ward, the songs were far more forgettable than what they made with him. I have all sorts of theories about why that is—sometimes a very talented artist needs to have someone who’s known them since they were young and not famous or important to say, “hey, you’re full of shit here” and the best session musician in the world is never going to say that; even someone who’s equally famous might just not know how to needle someone in the right way to get them to drop their bad idea, while a friend they made when they were a teenager can poke at their insecurities for the good of the band. Who knows! But I know that by the time the glow of Whiskeytown faded off of Adams and he became a big star, his songs stopped mattering to me.

Then, when we learned who he was and what he’d done (and it’s probably worth noting that Adams no longer disputes what Bridgers, Mandy Moore, and five other women who talked to the New York Times said), I lost my connection to a lot of his work. I don’t know where he’s at these days, and I don’t really care much. I do know that he recently performed a weirdly petty song attacking Jason Isbell for no discernible reason other than being jealous that Isbell seems to have the career Adams expected to have; which is kind of funny, because for as nice a guy as Isbell is purported to be, if you were to take his best song (“If We Were Vampires”) and put it on Heartbreaker or Gold, it would be the second-worst song of the bunch. (“Tina Toledo’s Streetwalking Blues” is the worst one.) But a song isn’t just great because it’s well-performed or has powerful lyrics or has an undeniable hook. It’s great because it means something to you, and most of Adams’s work doesn’t do that anymore for me. Whiskeytown, on the other hand, is the work of him and Caitlin Cary and Mike Daly (and, for a while, Phil Wandscherer, who quit before Pneumonia, the album from which “Jacksonville Skyline” comes), and it sounds like it, too. I’m glad they all found one another to make music with when they were young.