“If you run into my sister tell her Elvis is cool but the Rolling Stones will sweep her away”
Cracks in a photograph is from the unreleased album that was supposed to be the follow-up to Adams’ solo debut Heartbreaker. We can only speculate why the album was shelved, but it is a bleak affair and the title was/is Suicide Handbook. I’m guessing the record company wasn’t too thrilled by what they got served.
The song is the 4th song on the second disc and I will describe it as a hidden gem or a buried treasure, to my knowledge it has never been performed live. It is one of his finest compositions, but maybe it is too close and too true to those bad feelings from before, even for Ryan Adams. The song could be interpreted as part of a suicide note, or at least the notes from a man making amends and leaving “the old life”.
“Maybe I had something nobody saw, blame it on the wall”
Ryan Adams is fantastic songwriter and musician, maybe he is one of the very few geniuses in the art form. Many reviewers are complaining about his vast output, I’m not, I think his body of work is remarkably high in quality. What is even more remarkable is that much of his songwriting is unavailable to the public. His output could have been double of what his discography tells us. A lot of his recorded material is of equally high quality, and in some cases even higher, than his official albums/songs.
I have more than 2000 Ryan Adams related songs on my hard disk, many of them are unreleased songs in studio quality, it was quite a task to pick one to present to you…
In 2001, Ryan Adams made one of the best albums of his career, and never released it. It’s one of my favorite albums and it has never seen the light of day. The name of the album is 48 Hours. It was recorded during a, yes you guessed it, 48 hour intense session. 48 Hours is the stuff og legends. It was recorded shortly after Gold, and it was helmed by multi-instrumentalist Ethan Johns who produced Adams’ Heartbreaker. For reasons unknown, 48 Hours was shelved in favor of Demolition (which does include a few tracks from the session). I love Demolition but 48 Hours is another league.
There are so many good songs on the album, there are at least 5 masterpieces and no fillers. I should’ve done a post on the whole record, but…
I’ve chosen a country song from 48 Hours as my fifth in the Unreleased series, the song is called Walls:
Great pedal-steel work by Greg Leitz!
I see Walls as a song about looking back at your life, discovering that you maybe should have been more open, it’s about “the walls” between people.
Walls, lyrics:
These are the walls
Walls are emptiness made
Yeah, and this is the storm
Looks like it’s gonna hold
Yeah, nobody knows
Who they are around here anymore
Cigarettes and some beers
Then it’s back in the car to the store
Ain’t it funny how we forgot who we were through the years
Put your fist through the wall cryin’ television tears
Maybe I had something nobody saw
Blame it on the walls
Well the rain’s gonna come
Come and wash away all of our sins
And if the damn doesn’t break
Going to wash it away with some gin
Cause they got money to make
And I’ve always got a reason to go
Sheets don’t move from the bed
My head doesn’t move from the floor
Ain’t it funny how we forgot who we were through the years
Put your fist through the wall cryin’ television tears
Maybe I had something nobody saw
Blame it on the walls
Ain’t it funny how we forgot who we were through the years
Put your fist through the wall cryin’ television tears
Put your fist through the wall cryin’ television tears
Put your fist through the wall cryin’ television tears
Put your fist through the wall cryin’ television tears
Put your fist through the wall cryin’ television tears
Yeah . . . yeah . . . yeah
Oh . . . oh
This is a new series (hopefully). We we seek out and present unreleased songs by various artists. Check out the About Us page and you’ll get a picture of what artists we are concentrating this series on. This does not mean that we will only do songs by these artists/groups, but our focus will be on that list.
We will start with a Born in the U.S.A. outtake by Bruce Springsteen. We are eagerly waiting for Tracks part 2, The Boss have a lot of great songs that are still unreleased.
I stand alone at my window I see you waiting in the shadows down below I feel your fingers on my face I know I want to stay, but I want to run away
Our first unreleased track is Protection, here in a studio version by Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street band:
It was recorded in Jan-Feb 1982 at the Hit Factory in New York. “Protection” is written by Bruce Springsteen for Donna Summer. It was originally featured on the 1982 Donna Summer album which was produced by Quincy Jones.
Record executive David Geffen, a friend Jon Landau, asked Landau if his client could write something for Donna Summer who had joined his label Geffen Records. The idea was that Springsteen and Summer record the song as a duet, so Springsteen wrote Cover Me!
She could really sing and I disliked the veiled racism of the anti-disco movement
– Bruce Springsteen (Songs)
