Come Pick Me Up

This is a song about loving someone who treats you terribly, and it doesn't moralize or reach for a lesson — it just inhabits the feeling with devastating clarity. The production is lo-fi and warm, Adams's voice close-miked against a modest acoustic arrangement that leaves enormous emotional room. There's pedal steel somewhere in the mix, that instrument that seems engineered specifically to make heartache more bearable and more unbearable simultaneously. The song's core tension is the gap between what the narrator knows (this person is destructive, unreliable, possibly cruel) and what he wants anyway (for them to show up, even now). It's a portrait of the specific humiliation of desire — the way wanting someone can override every rational self-protective instinct. Adams delivers the vocal with a kind of rueful softness, never letting it tip into self-pity or bitterness, which is the hard thing to do with material like this. The melodies are beautiful in a casually devastating way, as if he wrote them without trying. This belongs to the Heartbreaker album, his debut proper, which arrived fully formed as one of the great American singer-songwriter records — raw and specific in the way only albums made quickly and honestly tend to be. Reach for it when something is ending and you're not quite ready to admit it.