Ryan Adams Releasing an Album Made with Pinball Machine Audio

If there’s one thing fans know for sure about Ryan Adams, it’s that he is always more than willing to change up his vibe from album-to-album and test out different musical landscapes. Although he’s done lots of alt-country tinged work, he’s also recorded and released albums like Rock N’ Roll (a rock album, duh!) and churned out the punk on his 1984 7″. Let’s also not forget about his appreciation for metal (Orion) and covers of pop songs (1989).

Now, however, Adams seems to be diving into a much more ambitious project: an album that’ll primarly feature audio taken from his extensive pinball machine collection.

Due out October 7, Pinball Blizzard (perhaps Adams is giving a nod to The Who, as well as Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Oz album?) is a 10-song affair that according to a press release will “balance Heartbreaker era melodies, Cold Roses‘ expansiveness and Gold‘s eclectic twang-driven explorations, guided and influenced by the noises of arcade games – namely pinball machines.”

Comments Adams: “As much as I adore picking up the guitar and strumming something beautiful and new, few things in life feel as good on my fingers as the buttons of a worked in pinball machine. Your palms soon get sweaty, you start using your body to put a little extra English on the machine, then all of a sudden the ‘thwaps,’ ‘bings,’ laser sounds and nostalgic game soundtracks start tempting your ears. It’s an incredible thing to witness, so one day I thought, ‘let’s hook up some mics and capture this!’ This is so fucked up, I can’t help but love it.”

When discussing how much influence these pinball machine recordings will have on the album, Adams says, “They’ll be more present than the lyrics. Those will be minimal. This time around, I wanted the machines to do the talking. There’s of course some guitar, bass and drums happening too, but their presence will also be minimal.”

Concludes Adams: “This may lose me some fans, but you know, I gotta stay true to my roots: both artistically and arcade-ingly.”

How and where can you purchase Pinball Blizzard? Nowhere, of course, this is an April Fools’ Day joke after all!

Thanks for playing!

-Adam Grant