Come Pick Me Up

Ryan Adams wrote “Come Pick Me Up” as a kind of backward love letter — a list of every wrong thing the other person had done to him, sung as if he’d like them to do all of it again. Kim Richey sings harmony. The harmonica is the most devastated harmonica on any record from the year 2000.

The song has the specific clarity of a cold morning when you finally admit to yourself that you would still take the call. It is a bad-news song delivered with such unembarrassed melody that it lands as comfort anyway. Five minutes. Coffee. A sweater. The year has turned.