Whiskeytown to Reunite
Three years after disbanding, Whiskeytown are planning a reunion.
The North Carolina-based band was founded in 1994 and went through
a series of lineup changes before frontman Ryan Adams and
singer/violinist Caitlin Cary splintered it to start solo careers.
But Adams recently approached Cary and her husband/drummer Skillet
Gilmore, who played with the band on its first album, 1996’s
Faithless Street, to talk about getting together again.
“I always thought that this would happen, but I was thinking it
would be five years from now,” Cary says. “Ryan made a good point,
‘Why wait until we’re old and pathetic? We should have a reunion
while we’re all still young and vibrant.’ It could be like a Neil
Young, Crazy Horse kind of thing, where every five years we’d get
together and make a record. It would be really fun to have
Whiskeytown on the backburner in that way.”
Adams addressed the Whiskeytown reunion on his Web site. “I’d
like very much to go and work on some music with Caitlin and
Skillet,” Adams posted, “and seeing as we’ve been talking about it
for a while now, why not? Caitlin has her own life now out there,
and so do I, which would only make it more fun for both of us. I
think it’s time Whiskeytown make an actual record we like.”
Whiskeytown’s tumultuous run yielded three critically acclaimed
albums that helped shove the alternative country movement to the
brink of the mainstream. The band’s swan song, released after its
breakup, was 2001’s Pneumonia, though Adams and Cary were
the only original members left in the band at that point. Cary has
released two albums, and Adams three, since the band called it
quits.
“I’ve yet to rib Ryan about saying that Whiskeytown was a
‘creative prison,'” says Cary. “Although in some ways it probably
was for both of us. Now that I feel I know better what I’m doing
and I have less of an agenda, it would be easier to do a
collaborative thing. But it remains to be seen if we’re better at
collaborating — it’s fucking hard to be in a band.”