Pneumonia (25th Anniversary Remastered Edition) Whiskeytown

• 1 The Ballad Of Carol Lynn 03:04
• 2 Don't Wanna Know Why 03:59
• 3 Jacksonville Skyline 03:00
• 4 Reasons To Lie 03:29
• 5 Don't Be Sad 03:20
• 6 Sit & Listen To The Rain 04:04
• 7 Under Your Breath 03:27
• 8 Mirror, Mirror 03:15
• 9 Paper Moon 04:42
• 10 What The Devil Wanted 03:38
• 11 Crazy About You 02:45
• 12 My Hometown 02:45
• 13 Easy Hearts 05:08
• 14 Bar Lights 03:45
• 15 To Be Evil 03:40
• Total Runtime 54:01

Info for Pneumonia (25th Anniversary Remastered Edition)

Celebrating 25 years, Pneumonia stands as an alt-country centerpiece, capturing Whiskeytown at their most expansive and iconic moment. The album blends rootsy grit with lush, melodic arrangements. Standouts like “Jacksonville Skyline” and “The Ballad of Carol Lynn” highlight its emotional depth and enduring influence. This special Clearwater Blue vinyl edition pairs the record’s timeless sound with a striking, atmospheric presentation.

In the spring of 2001 I had broken up with my first boyfriend, a relationship that just barely fit the category. I chose him because he chose me, and after three weeks I realized there was nothing I liked about him besides his thinking I was worthy of kissing. I heartlessly dumped him over AOL, knowing it wasn’t right but terrified that nobody would ever take his place, that he was the last one who’d ever think there was something in me worth getting to know better.

Emo is about complicated, sometimes contradictory emotions. I wasn’t mature enough to think outside of an emotional binary. I was happy or sad, angry or peaceful. But when my mom put on the album that summer, in a car driving down the Jersey coast, the first line punched me in the chest. “Loving you / has gotten weird” introduced a whole other realm of possible relationships that I’d never considered. Not happiness, not sadness, but a stagnant ache that I realized I recognized but had never put a name to. “The Ballad of Carol Lynn” was about a woman the narrator no longer wanted to be with, because she was stubborn and spiteful. But she was a woman that was worth knowing in the first place.

I was hearing something familiar. Pneumonia has the confessional tone of the emo I was listening to at the time, the self-analyzation that spirals into selfishness, where you dive so far into your own head you can’t get out. “There’s a self-consciousness to it. The album feels like it’s as much about its own ambition as anything else,” wrote David Menconi in his book about frontman Adams. It was profoundly introspective, which is what makes emo so appealing, especially when you’re a teenager whose life until that point could only be described as “fine.” But Pneumonia’s scale was bigger. It wasn’t just dealing with love or betrayal, but the entirety of the emotional spectrum. And I wanted something to be emotional about. I wanted something to happen to me that was worthy of a breakdown. I wanted to look inside my own head and find something, anything, worth being introspective about.

Whiskeytown’s Pneumonia deals in the indicative mood, zooming in on specific emotions, spinning them around from all angles, but presenting them plainly. “Jacksonville Skyline” is introspective but factual, “The soldiers fill the hotels on the weekends” as obvious as “I was born in an abundance of inherited sadness.” There is no wishing or commanding, just an acceptance of what is and always will be. On “Sit & Listen To The Rain,” Adams looks at a before and after, not necessarily wistfully, just recognizing what has changed. “Sit around and dream away what I’ve become / Used to feel so much, now I just feel dumb.”

I was the “now” without the “used to.” In Pneumonia I saw despair and sadness and confusion and mournful acceptance, emotions no one exactly wants to have, but emotions that could only come from interesting and complicated people, which I was not. I saw feelings I didn’t have the capacity to feel yet. Nowhere did that become more apparent than in “Under Your Breath,” which starts so unassumingly it feels like Adams is whispering to you. In the first chorus he admits “Sometimes I wish I were deaf / Then I wouldn’t hear the words you say under your breath,” but by the second he changes it to “But I hear the words you say.” He leans into the pain of whatever she’s saying, unable to ignore it to save himself.

If there’s any hallmark of emo it’s to lionize the painful, and through that display a sort of inverted optimism. Things are bad because they were once good. You miss things and people and experiences because they are worthy of being missed. And it’s immature to associate pain and drama with some idea of realness, but as a teen, you have to start somewhere. I wanted the pain and heartbreak and despair, because I wanted to be enough of a person to have that happen to me. And in Pneumonia, I saw a life I didn’t necessarily want, but one where that could happen.

The album ends on my favorite type of song, an upbeat heartbreaker, “Bar Lights.” Adams and Cary harmonize over the last line, “I’ve got five more dollars/ that won’t make you mine,” the kind of line you sing at the top of your lungs with a smile on your face and tears in your eyes. Everything I could possibly feel existed in those words and that arrangement, and in Pneumonia, every feeling is a fact. By that point the band was already gone. Everything was already over. But that’s okay, because it could all exist. (Jaya Saxena, bkmag.com)

Ryan Adams, guitars, vocals, piano & harmonica
Caitlin Cary, fiddle & backing vocals
Mike Daly, guitars, pedal steel, lap steel, dulcimer, mandocello, mandolin, keyboards & backing vocals
Brad Rice, guitars
Jennifer Condos, bass
Richard Causon, keyboards
James Iha, guitars & backing vocals
Tommy Stinson, guitar & dobro
James Jumbo Aumonier, celeste
Ethan Johns, drums, bass, mandolin, mandocello, keyboards, percussion & guitars

Digitally remastered

Whiskeytown
was an alt-country band from Raleigh, North Carolina founded in 1994 and fronted by Ryan Adams along with violinist Caitlin Cary. The band produced a number of albums before ultimately parting ways in 2000.

Other members of the group included guitarists Mike Daly and Phil Wandscher, bassist Steve Grothmann and drummer Skillet Gilmore.

Adams and Cary have publicly talked of reuniting Whiskeytown on multiple occasions, as recently as 2005, but as of yet, nothing new has materialized. The two did perform together briefly, along with Skillet Gilmore, on June 8, 2005, in Raleigh.

Major recordings include: Faithless Street (Mood Food, 1995) which was later reissued with additional tracks and a new mix. Strangers Almanac (Outpost, 1997).

Pneumonia (Lost Highway, 2001) the band's swan song, which Adams labored over for two years before its release, by which time the group had split up.

The EP Rural Free Delivery (Mood Food, 1997) collects unreleased tracks from the early days and is apparently reviled by Adams.

This album contains no booklet.