My Top 1000 Songs #841: New York, New York

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Paying earnest tribute to Ryan Adams can be a bit thorny these days. There's the whole problematic aspect to his personal life--and while I try to separate the artist from the art, whether it's Roger Waters or Morrissey or Van Morrison or Ken Stringfellow or whomever, it can't help but creep in. Beyond that, his fashioning himself as America's answer to Guided By Voices' Robert Pollard, almost comically prolific, to the point where it's hard to pay much attention to any particular song or album because there are just too damn many of them, has kinda led to some of his more quality work getting lost in the abundance.

Plus, talk about songs with baggage..."New York, New York" (off 2001's Gold) just happened to be slated for release on September 11, 2001, featuring a video shot a few days earlier with the Twin Towers looming large in the background... can make a simple, buoyantly catchy break-up track that just happens to be set in the city feel like unintentional jingoism.

But, if you can, try to step away from all that for a moment, and it's a helpful reminder that Adams can be a pretty great songwriter.

Solo piano, live on Letterman, a few days post-9/11:

And with the band, live on Leno, later that month: