Ryan Adams - Lucky Now

I'm confused about Ryan Adams. I can't tell whether he's really good, or just a really mediocre song writer with an awesome band. Sometimes his writing is incredibly lazy ('Waiting outside for you to find your keys / Like bags of trash in the blackening snow' - why the?). Other times I think, this is a man who just writes from the heart, without the need to overstate anything. ('So buy a pretty dress / Wear it out tonight / For all the boys you think could outdo me')

This is the man who wrote Sylvia Plath, Easy Plateau, Magnolia Mountain, My Winding Wheel, and Shadowlands. Worthy, beautiful music. But he's also got a sizeable catalogue of really average music, a lot of which has the stench of a man desperate to fulfill his record label contract. One could say, Mayeresque?

Sometimes he manages to fit awesome and mediocre into the same song. Take his latest single 'Lucky Now', which essentially comprises a drunken ramble during the verses, only to smash out an incredibly listenable chorus and an even better guitar solo (see earlier comments about him perhaps being saved by his band?).

I imagine turning up to band rehearsal must be quite the roller coaster. "Wow! Ryan! That was awesome. Love it! What else have you got?... Oh... Uh huh.... ok. what else? .... hmmmm.... Well... Um... yeah.... we can work with that...Yeah, that'll be ok once we whack a few guitar solos on ... What else?... Um. Ok... Lets take a break."