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So It's Come To This: Apparently Ryan Adams Is A Weatherman Now

Ryan Adams fulfills a dream.
YouTube
Ryan Adams fulfills a dream.

Summer hasn't even officially begun yet, and it's already been a disorienting season. The president is complimenting a North Korean leader and lambasting one from Canada. Raccoons are scaling 25-story buildings, ostensibly for our amusement. And apparently Ryan Adams, no longer content to serve as one of America's most celebrated singer-songwriters, is doing the local weather on a Denver TV station, fulfilling what he says is a longtime dream.

While in Denver to play a show at the Red Rocks Amphitheater, Adams cooked up an arrangement with a local TV station wherein he'd give Wednesday's weather report and write and record a song to be played on air. First, watch the animated video that accompanies the new original composition "Denver7 (Piece of Heaven)," which... okay, fair warning, this isn't the best song Adams has ever written.

Naturally, Denver7 was only too happy to live up to its end of the bargain, so Adams donned a Batman T-shirt and some flannel, appeared in a short interview, shouted out the movie Twister (for inspiring his love of the weather), and gave the station's Wednesday-evening weather report in front of a green screen.

For a first-timer with no formal meteorological training, Adams fared reasonably well, ad-libbing a bit about 10-15 mph winds ("For anybody that's super into the wind, there you go") and only occasionally wandering out of the frame entirely. So, yeah, there you go! In the America of June 2018, our enemies are our friends, our friends are our enemies, raccoons are our heroes and Ryan Adams is our weatherman.

Best of luck to us all!

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)