Listen Up: Ryan Adams' 70s-Rock Feel

Ryan Adams, "Destroyers"
The first track from Adams' forthcoming album Cardinals III/IV, which collects material recorded during the Easy Tiger sessions into "the Cardinals second double-album concept rock opera about the '80s, ninjas, cigarettes, sex and pizza," has more of a loose-limbed, '70s-rock feel. Not that this quality is necessarily a bad thing. (Adams' site also has some demos from that era available for download.)

OMD, "VCR"
Britain's New Wave stalwarts tip their collective cap to the next generation with this beautiful cover of a song by their much-buzzed-about fellow citizens the xx. This haunting track recalls the heights reached by the band's 1981 synthpop masterpiece Architecture & Morality. [Via]

Morose, "Tired"
The name of this band, and this song, will probably give you a good idea of just how downcast the music is. Thankfully, the misery the band wallows in comes off beautifully, thanks in part to a vocalist with a wail not unlike Morrissey's — and the three musicians who make up Morose figuring out a way to seamlessly segue autumnal shoegaze into a lovely pile of shimmering electropop.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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