Ryan Adams: Dreaming's Free
[don't purchase; download]
I've said it before: though it's blasphemous to say so, I'm a much bigger fan of Ryan Adams the sensitive folkpop artist than Ryan Adams the alt-country rocker. And this delicate piece is a beautiful love song, of the same acoustic playbook as Elliot Smith, Evan Dando, Beck, and other sensitive men who swing both ways musically.
That's David Rawlings and Gillian Welch on guitar flourishes there, by the way, as in most of Destroyer, an album blocked by Adams' label as "too folk", and still living a life as greyware, bootlegged and distributed through the 'net.
Dreaming is free, by the way. It's getting "all locked away," as Adams says, letting our dreamlives become all-encompassing, that's costly. The result is a slight hint of bittersweet in an otherwise simple love song, reminding us that dreams without action don't change the world much, save through our absence. As our week's theme comes to a close, it's worth remembering that - lest we lose sight of the dream which got us here in the first place.
