Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	(69/100)
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
Drowned in Sound	(8/10)
Entertainment Weekly	B
The Music Box
NME	(7/10)
Pitchfork Media	(7.2/10)
PopMatters
Robert Christgau
Rolling Stone
Uncut

Cold Roses is the sixth studio album by alt-country singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, released on May 3, 2005 on Lost Highway. The album is his first with backing band The Cardinals, and the first of three albums released in 2005. Cold Roses is the only album to include Cardinals member Cindy Cashdollar.

Cold Roses has sold 159,000 copies in the United States.

Although all the tracks can fit on a standard 80-minute disc, it was released as a double album with packaging and CDs designed to make it look like a vinyl LP. The album was also released in a standard 2-disc jewel case.

While performing in Liverpool in January 2004, Adams broke his left wrist when he slipped off the stage and fell six feet into the orchestra pit below. A painful recovery and rehab period followed over the next several months, as Adams relocated to his hometown of Jacksonville, North Carolina, and slowly relearned how to play guitar. "There would be tears streaming down my face as I struggled to play Black Sabbath songs,” he later said. During this difficult time, Adams was inspired by Jerry Garcia's playing because "he wasn’t afraid to fuck up". This fascination with The Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan pointed Adams in a new musical direction, and his next band - christened The Cardinals - was conceived as a loose, spacious musical collective.

In 2011, Adams claimed that "How Do You Keep Love Alive" was written while he was high on opium: "I fully understand when people say Edgar Allan Poe used to smoke this stuff and have visions. I wrote the entire song "How Do You Keep Love Alive" without writing a word down, and I played it on piano. And I've tried to understand the chord pattern ever since, because I can't fuckin' play it."

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