Ryan Adams is celebrating Valentine’s Day in fitting style, with the release of new track ‘Baby I Love You’.
The jangly rock epic is a romantic ode to a dwindling relationship, and comes following last year’s ‘Prisoner’ LP, a record which dissected his six-year marriage to actress Mandy Moore, which ended in 2015.
Check out ‘Baby I Love You’ below, via Spotify.
In recent months, Ryan Adams has been less than amorous, hitting out at all manner of fellow musicians, from The Strokes, to alt-J, and Father John Misty.
Adams dubbed alt-J a ‘mosquito bite’ at Lisbon’s NOS Alive festival last year, remarking: “If you ignore it, it will go away.” Similarly, he hit out at Father John Misty, calling the singer “the most self-important asshole on earth” in a bizarre Twitter rant.
In an ongoing feud with The Strokes, Adams once again took to Twitter last July, writing: “Abert Hammond is a more horrible songwriter than his dad. If that’s possible. It rains in Sthtrn CA & washes out the dirt As you were RA x”
He swiftly followed that up with a jibe at Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, tweeting “Julian Casablancas: who got you strung out on lasagna tho?”
Adams continued: “I should have got them addicted to writing better songs. Too bad The Killers did it for them” and “I sold more t shirts last night than people who actually made it thru a single Voidz song, bro – what’s he gonna do? Sit on me?”
The incident followed events earlier in the year surrounding the relationship between The Strokes and Adams, with the former claiming that Adams was in some way responsible for Hammond Jr.’s past heroin addiction.
The comments come in a new book by Lizzy Goodman called Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, 2001–2011, which details the rise of 2000s NYC indie bands such as The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol and Vampire Weekend.
In a lengthy excerpt from the book, Hammond’s bandmates describe Ryan Adams as having been a “bad influence” on Hammond’s past heroin habit while the band also talk about their rivalry with The Killers.
“I remember Julian threatening to beat Ryan [Adams] up if he hung out with me, as a protective thing,” said Albert Hammond Jr. “He’d heard that Ryan would come and give me heroin, so he was just like, ‘if you come to my apartment again with heroin, I’m going to kick your ass’.”
Hammond continued: “I hadn’t really been doing it in baggie form until Ryan showed up. He was definitely a bad influence.”