Bloodshot Records Week // Rob Miller on 10 Years Since Heartbreaker

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Rob Miller is Chicago’s Bloodshot Records head-honcho. Bloodshot are taking over TLOBF this week on the 10 year anniversary, almost to the day, that Ryan Adams’ seminal album Heartbreaker hit the shelves. Here he talks about the time and tales behind its release…

Like a great many rock and roll stories, it all started in a bathroom, specifically, the bathroom of the venerable Austin Texas club Antone’s during the South By Southwest Music Conference in March 2000. Ryan cornered me by the sinks and asked if Bloodshot would want to put out his first solo album. Of course we would. We were mutual fans and friends and it was a natural fit.

By our standards at the time, the record was scarily expensive. Back then, Bloodshot existed on the edge of perpetual oblivion, what little profits there were going back into the label to fund early records by Neko Case, Alejandro Escovedo and others. My partner and I took out personal loans to cover the recording. Expectations were modest; after all, no one might care about, as the narrative went at the time, the debut solo record by a former member of Whiskeytown. The original pressing was to be 10,000 copies, with 7,500 in stores on release date.

Then we got the finished record. I’ll never forget the day we first heard it. Wide-eyed. Breathless. While Ryan’s songwriting gifts had been hinted at in Whiskeytown, on Heartbreaker they burst forth with astonishing, brash and gutsy power. It was, as they say, lightning captured in a bottle, but would it find an audience?

By the time of its release in September, word was spreading. The press was ebullient, retail orders slowly, cautiously (as if they couldn’t believe its appeal either) mushroomed and tour dates sold out ever rapidly; it is impossible to describe the feeling of a show at Schubas in Chicago, when art and artist and a hushed, reverent audience coalesced into a genuine phenomenon. As the months went by, we began re-ordering in 20 and 30,000 amounts (today, sales are in the several hundred thousand range worldwide). We were watching a release of ours grow beyond a simple record into something entering the broader cultural awareness.

Over the years, Heartbreaker has remained a consistent seller, an album that popped up on countless Best of the Decade lists, and something of a classic. It allowed us the freedom to continue our quixotic trip in venal snake pit of the music industry with a measure of security. It showed that an album could, at once, be a “hit” but also leave a sustained imprint on the landscape.

With Heartbreaker, the stars aligned in the oft fickle and unfair world of popular music: talent begat praise, praise begat publicity, publicity begat momentum and momentum begat a record, a singular artistic statement that, like any true classic, holds up, exists beyond the time in which it was released. It sounds as fresh and compelling and exciting today as the day I first heard it.

I wonder if, in this era of immediacy, content saturation and ingestion, of shrinking retail outlets and industry obsession with First Week Sales, if a Heartbreaker, with its slow, sustained emotional burn, would even be possible. I hope so, for the sake of music and culture as a whole.

Look out for exclusive content, interviews and more this week…