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Feb 6, 2017Adams assembles a stunning scrapbook that captures heartbreak in an intimate array of snapshots, a collection that marks his most accomplished record since Heartbreaker.
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Feb 17, 2017Mostly though, Adams seems possessed by the same spirit that gets into his pal Taylor Swift when she’s hurt. He sounds like he’s savoring how full of life his music is, no matter what it took to make it so. He hasn’t just turned misery into art; he’s turned it into joy.
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Feb 15, 2017Prisoner doesn’t differ enough from its recent predecessors to stand out as a singular mid-career achievement for the ever-prolific songwriter, but it’s one of Adams’ most fully-realized, sturdy collections to date, and quite possibly his finest record of the past decade.
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Feb 16, 2017Prisoner isn’t a heartbreak record--it’s potentially the heartbreak record, for my generation at least. Turns out sadness really is quite the currency.
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Feb 17, 2017Prisoner is an album filled with Adams reconciling his doubts and fears about life and love with his faith in music and the power of song. And ultimately--thankfully--music wins out over heartbreak in the end.
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Feb 21, 2017The album tails off after a strong start. Lyrically though, and as a view into Adams’ psychopathology, Prisoner is nothing short of fascinating.
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Feb 21, 2017Here he turns in a set of fine, affecting songs, from the 80s soft rock of Anything I Say to You Now and Do You Still Love Me?, to the more introspective We Disappear, which recalls Paul Westerberg at his most intimate.
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Feb 17, 2017Adams does his job just well enough on this album that we’re willing to join him on that downward spiral and maybe, as listeners, locate the catharsis that eludes the lonely “I” living the songs.
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Feb 17, 2017It's not a record that wallows in hurt, it's an album that functions as balm for bad times.
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Feb 16, 2017Adams is not breaking new ground with Prisoner, but it seems churlish to quibble when he’s at the peak of his powers.
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Feb 15, 2017Prisoner is an album that must have been tough for Adams to write and record, but ends up sounding like one of the great break-up albums of recent times.
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Feb 15, 2017Prisoner isn’t quite up to the career-best standards of its predecessors, but it’s a remarkably focused and effective successor nonetheless.
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Feb 15, 2017Prisoner works well as a deep-winter heartbreak album, with acoustic guitars and ruminations on loss cutting through the cold air.
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Feb 14, 2017Prisoner is also one of Adams's most sonically artful albums to date.
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MagnetFeb 14, 2017There's craft galore on display here. [No. 139, p.52]
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Q MagazineJan 25, 2017A broken heart has long been the conductor for Adams's talent--it's a testament to the quality here that he sounds so thoroughly broken this time. [Mar 2017, p.107]
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UncutJan 25, 2017A more sombre, focused affair [than 2015's covers album of Taylor Swift's 1989]. [Mar 2017, p.23]
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Mar 13, 2017It’s full of layers and little emotions, rather than just being a slave to the bigger issues and emotions, and that’s what makes it authentic.
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Feb 17, 2017It’s a beautiful sounding collection, no question. Sometimes, though, Adams’ exacting, just-so approach to the sonics undercuts the power of his lyrics.
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Feb 17, 2017The contrast between his interiority and the sturdiness of his compositions is striking. So, too, is the contrast between this album and Heartbreaker, his lauded solo debut. Ranking breakup records is a ghoul’s errand; suffice to say that loss was Heartbreaker’s fuel. Here, it’s turned to fumes.
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Feb 17, 2017Sometimes he can almost be too faithful to his heroes: "Haunted House" is like a reconstructed Tunnel of Love, right down to its titular metaphor. But when the songwriting feels as personal and urgent as the scholarship (see the raw-bone heartland-rocker "Doomsday"), he gets close to the magnum opus of his dreams.
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Feb 16, 2017In spite of the abundance of retro rock references, Adams' gut-spilling lyricism and vulnerable vocal performances (a waver here, a crack and a tremble there) still give Prisoner enough heart to steer it clear of sounding like a washed-up cliché.
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Feb 15, 2017[Ryan Adams draws] from a well of sadness and confusion that seems only to have deepened by the time he gets to the album’s closer.
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Alternative PressFeb 1, 2017While they're not all winners, tracks like the lonesome, devastating "Shiver and Shake" prove Adams remains as powerfully evocative a songwriter as ever. [Mar 2017, p.80]
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Oct 5, 2017Prisoner, his 16th release and most obvious homage to Springsteen's early-Eighties output, doesn't stray, though it does find Adams at his most heavy-handed lyrically.
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Feb 15, 2017It’s another down-the-middle, crowd-pleasing Ryan Adams record at a time when that crowd was expecting him to bring the heat.
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Feb 15, 2017Prisoner sticks to the well-trodden highways, whether it’s the echoes of U2 in the grand guitar stabs and earnest vocal tone of opener “Do You Still Love Me”, or the spangly, flanged guitars and relaxed sense of space that lend “Anything I Say To You Now” the laidback stadium sound of The Police.
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Feb 13, 2017Though there’s some absolutely gorgeous production that recalls the lush sound and synthscapes of 80s rock, the songwriting is weighed down by clichés.
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Feb 2, 2017The thing is, by Adams’ standards, too many of the songs sound slightly underwritten.
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MojoJan 25, 2017Ultimately Prisoner is tethered by sturdy, familiar images of tightropes and trains. [Mar 2017, p.94]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 31 out of 38
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Mixed: 6 out of 38
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Negative: 1 out of 38
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Mar 22, 2017
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Dec 4, 2017
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Sep 26, 2017