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Ryan Adams “Lost” Album Blackhole Finally Released – 11/15/2024 – A Deeper Dive

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Mockup of vinyl packaging for Ryan Adams Blackhole

Announced unexpectedly today from Ryan Adams‘s camp is the long-awaited (or long-delayed) release of Blackhole. From the description in the webstore:

Ryan Adams’ infamous cult classic album “Blackhole” will be released on classic black vinyl and CD for the very first time.

The album’s contents and final track listing have been widely speculated since its conception in the early 00’s. After nearly two decades of anticipation, Adams is now ready to unveil the official release of Blackhole. Featuring “Catherine”, heard only in live performances, alongside previously unheard material, Blackhole captures the raw, unfiltered emotion that defines Adam’s songwriting.

The shelved album, first demoed in 2006, became heavily bootlegged, with fans circulating low-quality recordings and snippets from live performances, fueling a demand for the album’s official release. This long-awaited, full-length album not only satisfies years of fan speculation, but also reclaims a crucial moment in Ryan Adam’s history.

I made an article back in 2014 collecting everything I could find about Blackhole when he started performing two tracks from it during the self-titled album tour. Here is the link to that article:

The Blackhole Album Story – What We Know (and Ultimately Don’t) About Ryan Adams’s Unreleased Masterpiece

I had been following Ryan’s career really closely for about ten years at that point and the Blackhole album was talked about a lot in the various forums online. The interesting part about the album was that it really hadn’t leaked up until that point and the only information about it was from Ryan himself.

The short version is that he recorded most of the album over Christmas 2005 with Jamie Candiloro and spent four years working on it adding guitar parts, mixing and other work. In 2010 he had the masters completed and showed a picture of the test pressing which marked the long journey of announcements of Blackhole releases with one of the most recent announcements in 2018. The 11-track album confirms some of the tracks that have leaked over the years and there seems to be some new titles, that I’ve never heard, but based on the general tone of the album, which Adams once described as “Love Is Hell Pt. 3” I’m sure they’ll be more of the same Smiths-influenced guitar rock.

Here is the confirmed tracklist from the order page along with my notes about where these have leaked or debuted previously. Some of these songs have leaked in different versions and presumably mixes a few times over the years. It really is some of his best work in my opinion.

  1. The Door (debuted on World Cafe here is the 2023 studio version from YouTube)
  2. Call Me Back
  3. Help Us
  4. Likening Love to War (Here is the 2010 version leaked to YouTube)
  5. Starfire (leaked in the 24-album dump to his website as part of Fasterpiece credited to Sad Dracula – Here is the 2023 version)
  6. Just You Wait
  7. For The Sun (studio version leaked to YouTube)
  8. Catherine (debuted on World Cafe and Newport Folk Fest Here is the 2023 version leaked to YouTube)
  9. Tomorrowland (debuted in the 2006 Pax Am Digital Series)
  10. Runaway
  11. When I Smile (leaked to YouTube)

You can pre-order Blackhole in either CD or vinyl versions from his webstore:

The LP: https://paxam.shop/products/blackhole-lp
The CD: https://paxam.shop/products/blackhole-cd
The T-Shirt: https://paxam.shop/products/blackhole-t-shirt

(Free Download) Ryan Adams is Back in Black With Metal Album as Orion

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On Friday, March 12th, the long dormant Twitter account for Ryan Adams passed along this missive:

We’re going to begin pressing ORION — my most legit METAL record — on vinyl next week. http://ryanada.ms

At his website over the weekend, he debuted a song called “Electrosnake” from his upcoming album Orion. This song is still available for free download (as a WAV file!). There was also a survey that was shut down yesterday asking whether respondants would buy this album. On his Facebook page later that day, he posted that 69,567 people wanted a copy of Orion! “That is too many,” he said, “but it is cool getting to figure out what the manufacture numbers are before you go to press.”

Last year Ryan re-launched his PaxAm label, which in the past had been used for some rare single releases. He released three digital download singles for a very reasonable $1.49, which included digital art. Two of the releases came in FLAC format and all three had a bonus track. He also stepped into the physical waters with a very limited edition pink 7″ which was available at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in NYC as part of an exhibition of his paintings and very briefly available on his website.

At the time he said that he was planning on releasing more of his archive of recordings and PaxAm was his way to do it. Now that Ryan is no longer tied to Lost Highway records and has disbanded The Cardinals he has time to focus on the new phase of his career and part of this is getting the records that Lost Highway didn’t release out there– and apparently there is an audience hungry for new material!

Which brings us to the new release going to press this week on PaxAm which will be Orion. According to a post by Ryan to the Ryan Adams Archive Boards on Saturday, Orionwas started by Ryan and producer Jamie Candiloro after Easy Tiger and had been in the works for over two years. Ryan says that Orion, “really wasn’t supposed to be anything other than a brutally badass thrash/metal record… Two years is a long time to work on a badass album of riffs and this is the one for me.”

Of course, this lit the boards up with contraversy– Ryan never made his love of metal a secret, and from time-to-time would post about metal  bands on his various Internet accounts and would even share some of his metal noodling on his collection of vintage BC Rich guitars, still his ardent fans of his more accessible country- and folk-influenced music were torn about whether this was a good thing. Ryan was taking this furor with a certain aplomb joking about it in the thread about the album. The track “Electrosnake” is apparently the most accessible of the tracks with a discernable melody and slower tempo. “Electro Snake may have been the wrong FREE track now that I think of it,” said Ryan in a post,  “but I wanted to try and find something more contemporary because I predicted no matter what track some folks were gonna be all WTF…. the rest of the record is pretty fast and pretty basic thrash. There are some poppier elements via VoiVod/Crumbsuckers but mainly it’s just sci-fi metal stuff. A few tracks, like two tracks in the middle of the record, get pretty heavy and slow and Vol 4 Sabbath-inspired kind of, but you know… I kind of handled all the guitars and bass on this so there is that. I left the drumming to the pro’s.”

So, what else do we know? I think that it will likely be released as a gatefold. He mentions that while there will be a release for people who don’t collect vinyl, the vinyl release will have some impressive art “inside.” I would take “inside” to mean gatefold. So, that is something to look forward to.

I’ve been really anxious for this post-Lost Highway period to start for Ryan. He’s been itching to get some releases out of his back catalog and he’s apparently working on new material with Candiloro this week as well. Without the restrictions of a record label, there is no telling what we will get from Ryan.

Click Here for Ryan Adams’s website where you can download or stream “Electrosnake” from the upcoming Orion album. This will be where the album will be offered for sale.
ORION . ELECTROSNAKE by ryanadams