Ryan Adams: Exile on Franklin Street.....

First Visit to This Mornin' I Am Born Again...?

start at the beginning of

the Ryan Adams Spotlight....

Hold The Phone. In my haste to get to some of the more exciting album reviews in Ryan Adams' collection (the cardinals), i have chronologically overlooked a few of the infamous unreleased albums floating around out there. My plan all along has been to completely review the Ryan Adams back-catalog - highlighting the best aspects of each album - while posting some alternate versions/unreleased/bonus material from each. The only thing is.... i jumped in without much of a plan at all. i knew i wanted to give all his work a fair chance, because i've ran across many a song of Ryan's that absolutely floors me - and some of those are hidden amongst music that is either very hard to find, or a little too obscure for me. As prolific as Ryan is - referring simply to his official releases - this endeavor would not be complete if i don't include these multiple albums-worth of studio recordings that Bloodshot/Lost Highway deemed un-worthy for release.

A couple Whiskeytown sessions have already seen the glory of a proper release: The Baseball Park Sessions that appeared on the re-issue of Faithless Street and, most recently, some extra material done during the Strangers Almanac recording session: The Deluxe Edition.

As we saw in 2005 (with the release of 3 studio albums - one of them a double-disc), Ryan's overwhelming writing outputs occur in over-inspired bursts. While i did briefly mention The Destroyer Sessions and Exile on Franklin Street in my Heartbreaker review, there are three additional 'so-called sessions' that took place in the time-frame from - just prior to Heartbreaker up to the recording of Gold: The Pinkheart Sessions, The Suicide Handbook, and 48 Hours.

You can read about all of Ryan's "sessions" here
at AnsweringBell.com

With the release of the Ryan Adams Box-Set seeming more-and-more as likely as Chinese Democracy (both the political endeavor and the Guns N' Roses reunion album), i figured i better not hold my breath and go ahead and post some of what i have. I suspect that the box-set, if it ever sees the light of day, will be remasterd and possibly deepened, but these session recordings are often bare, and sometimes rough demos.

Exile on Franklin Street
Spring/Early Summer 2000

Van Alston helped with the production of this session and says it was intended to be part of a 4-disc Demolition series given over to Lost Highway. Obviously only one of the discs was released, and i'm not sure if the other two parts are some of the aforementioned sessions, but it sure makes you wonder how much goodness is still out there somewhere. Much of this session is made up of the random electric guitars and screaming that we sometimes see Ryan feel like he needs to excrete - reminiscent of some of the weird stuff he had streaming out of the Spaceship on DotComMuthaFucka. But as with all of his work, there are some hidden gems. The real songs on Exile show everything from his deep Stones influence to his very Whiskeytown-sounding stuff.

mp3: Ryan Adams - The Last Dance

mp3: Ryan Adams - Why You Wanna Lemme Down

Because i feel like being nice today, and because if the legal guys at Geffen/Interscope/whoever can't even figure out who has the rights to this material, i figure i can't get busted for posting this:
Download a Zip File of the complete Exile on Franklin Street session.

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Continue on to my review of The Destroyer Sessions.

Be sure to check out the rest of my extra-large Ryan Adams Spotlight.
1. Whiskeytown
2. Heartbreaker
3. Gold
or, just click here for all of them on one page.