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THE STRIFE OF RYAN

Ryan Adams interview
Uncut, June 2007

“REALLY,” decides Ryan Adams, eventually, “an artist is a lesser type of person. For someone to submit their ideas to this kind of process, it means that they’re not able to make sense of the world, or be at peace with it, or experience it for what it is, or understand that there are things you can’t fucking understand.”
  Adams, befitting a sentiment of such restlessness, rises from his seat for roughly the thousandth time this afternoon. He wanders briefly about his loungeroom, then relocates to the sofa with a slump, and a smiling sigh.
  “Everything,” he says, “comes back to this principle: there is shit you will never understand.”
  We have been trying, amid the bolting digressions that constitute much of Adams’ discourse, to figure out why he does what he does, and why he does so much of it. His imminent album, “Easy Tiger”, is the ninth instalment of a solo career which was announced with 2000’s monumental “Heartbreaker”, and which has maintained, give or take a few wilfully contrary gestures – notably 2003’s best-forgotten “Rock & Roll” – a quality all the more remarkable for its quantity. “Easy Tiger”, despite Adams’ own mixed feelings for it, of which more shortly, amply justifies its place in his canon. Measured against his most recent work – his hat-trick of 2005 albums, “Cold Roses”, “29”, “Jacksonville City Nights” – “Easy Tiger” is more rock, less country, but everything that has hitherto prompted hysterical, if understandable, comparisons to Bob Dylan and Gram Parsons, is lavishly present.
  The 13 songs throb with Adams’ knack for finding fresh angles in well-worn templates, for the construction of guilelessly affecting lyrics, and for the delivery of same with that extraordinary voice, as capable of a Tom Petty snarl as it is of a Jeff Buckley trill. If one was trying to distinguish “Easy Tiger” from what has preceded it, one might observe that it sounds like the work of a more relaxed writer, of a man who, if he hasn’t entirely tamed his demons, has at least calmed them down a bit. The Neil Young-like front-porch singalong “Tears Of Gold” is a cheerful shrug at the great inevitabilities, considering our progression from “flesh and blood” to “dust under the wheels” and concluding that “Without a love we’re only ash in urns of silver.”
  Adams, though he has perhaps suffered more than most from the tendency to read art as autobiography, seems happy enough to allow some conclusions to be drawn.
  “That,” he says, “is the part of my music that I am very willing to share. That’s where the meat is. That’s the point. It’s saying: I’m having this experience, and I’m going to take this experience and put it into this music, or into these verses of this song, in order to i) make sense of them and ii) to perform them in the form of a question. And the question is: I’m feeling this stuff. I’m a little confused by it. Is anybody else feeling this?”
  He rises from the sofa, and returns to one of the small wooden chairs around his low-rise coffee table.
  “It’s not a one-sided conversation,” says Adams, “but it’s how any great conversation starts: here’s something real, and weird, and I’m gonna throw it out there.”
 
IF Adams, now 32, doesn’t mind people making assumptions about him from his records, he shouldn’t object to them doing it about his decor. Adams’ Greenwich Village apartment is a study in organised chaos. The largely antique furniture is stacked with largely modern kitsch items – toy animals, comic book memorabilia, boxed figurines from “Lost”. Pride of place on the fireplace’s crowded marble mantlepiece is shared by a paperback of Anne Frank’s diary and a seven-inch of Husker Du’s 1987 single “Could You Be The One?”. A couple of the Depression-era quilts he collects are piled in one corner. There are many vinyl albums, and many more books, most of which appear to be non-fiction – recent reading, to judge by the volumes on the coffee table, includes Carl Sagan and Barack Obama. The walls hang Adams’ own paintings – violent, colourful abstracts. Any lingering doubts about what kind of person lives in a place like this would be put to flight by the battered guitar cases, and framed bill posters for a few more memorable Ryan Adams concerts (this perhaps appears immodest, but any remotely country singer who disdained to hang high on a prominent wall the proof that they once played at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium would be possessed of truly superhuman restraint). This is also the room in which Adams amuses himself with laptop-created side projects. He has recently uploaded to his Cardinal Radio website (www.ryan-adams.com/cardinalradio.html) something in the region of a dozen albums, under a variety of aliases (DJ Reggie, Sad Dracula, The Shit, WereWolph, et al).
  “That’s my lazy Saturday afternoon,” he grins. “It’s fun, and it’s free. I don’t really know what kind of art that is. I think it’s just goofing around.”
  Adams himself is the model of a rock star embracing geekiness, or a geek dressed up as a rock star. The tousled hair – which he thinks grows faster since surgery to repair the wrist he broke falling off a Liverpool stage in 2004 – hangs across thickly rimmed black plastic glasses. The regulation tartan cowboy shirt is draped over a Batman t-shirt. The fridge in the tiny kitchen is that of a single man, the guest catering amounting to a can of diet ginger ale. However, those riveted by the trajectory of Adams’ eventful romantic history – he previously has been “linked”, as the saying goes, with Parker Posey, Winona Ryder and Beth Orton, among others – may delight themselves with the revelation that he refers, happily and frequently, to a woman called Jessica (as in Joffe, apparently – a writer and model). Nudging a year free of alcohol and drugs other than nicotine, he seems initially as relaxed and reflective as he does on most of “Easy Tiger”, until “Easy Tiger” itself is discussed.
  “It’s not the record I wanted to make,” he says. “Not at all. I don’t dislike the record, but. . .”
  This is actually not an uncommon reaction to the release of a completed work. Most artists – the good ones, at least – feel uneasy finally letting something go. And, having worked on it so intently, can only hear what’s wrong with it. Adams acknowledges this, but says it’s not what he’s getting at. He wanted, he says, to make an album that was more about his backing band, The Cardinals. His record label, Lost Highway, were apparently unenthralled by this idea.
  “They were very specific,” says Adams. “They didn’t want a Cardinals record, they didn’t want a rock record. They wanted a record which was predominantly acoustic guitar, and just under my name. I obliged, because I only have so much fight in me.”
  This seems an odd thing to say. There are only a few fundamentally acoustic tunes on “Easy Tiger” – notably “These Girls”, “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc”. Most of the record rocks pretty unabashedly, frequently evocative of the Replacements-ish chug that underpinned “Gold”. And it doesn’t sound at all like it was tossed spitefully off, as Adams did with “Rock & Roll” – his reaction to Lost Highway’s reluctance to release “Love Is Hell”.
  “Yeah,” concedes Adams, “but something can be good because care went into the making of it. I can still mean what I’m singing, and still make a record in a style, but it can go against the grain of what seems natural to me, and this is definitely against the grain. It isn’t what naturally would have happened. I was as open-minded as possible about it, thinking what would still cover my areas of comfort within these constraints.”
  Adams’ conversation keeps returning to his band, The Cardinals, who he clearly adores and reveres as people and musicians. Only two tracks on “Easy Tiger” are credited solely to Adams. However, apparently at Lost Highway’s insistence, the Cardinals’ name doesn’t appear on the cover – doubly peculiar when it is recalled that “Cold Roses” and “Jacksonville City Nights” were credited to both the frontman and the sidemen.
  “I’m not interested,” he says, “in making solo records with my face on the cover. I’m into being in a band. I’m into exchanging a lot of crazy ideas and there being as intense instrumental music in the song as heavy verse, and several different voices telling the story. I’m just more interested in a collaborative process, and I’ve got that now.”
  Though Adams characterises the difference between “Easy Tiger” and the album in his head as “Day and night”, he’s vague about what he did want to do. Rockier, he reckons, more “bombastic”, to quote his own synopsis – he’s tired of playing acoustic guitar, can’t maintain his interest in writing what he calls “stock-sounding country songs”. He speaks enthusiastically about Black Sabbath circa “Black Sabbath Volume 4”, the Sabs’ 1972 album, in which Adams claims to discern traces of swampy country, and what he calls the “creepy, pretty” elements of The Grateful Dead. It may just be that this is precisely what drives Adams to such furious productivity, an instant boredom with the last thing, an impatience to be at the next. It sounds remarkably unlike the whimsical figure singing the gorgeous “Pearls On A String”: “Tomorrow’s on its way, and there’s always new songs to sing.”
  “Look man,” he says, “I’m gonna be dead honest. I can’t stand this part of it. It has always driven me crazy, and it used to drive me crazy in ways that I will never be able to understand. But I understand that it doesn’t work for me like that. I just wanna keep my job. I do the bare minimum in order to keep my job. I just love records. I just love to make music. But I think I understand now more than ever why it is impossible for some artists to maintain their sense of purpose, because so much about the business part of it has so little to do with the process. The worst part for me is that it becomes very tricky to hold onto who you are.”

THE armchair psychologist could be forgiven for asking, then, if Adams’ desire to withdraw more into his band is a reaction to the bruises left by the poking and prodding of a media often determined to portray him – although it’s not like he didn’t give us anything to work with – as a self-destructive, booze-soaked romantic on a death-or-glory kick.
  “They were going to do that to someone,” he says. “They just picked me. At the time I didn’t understand, but now I understand that those shoes created for me to fill had to be filled by someone. I was given a role to fill. I don’t mean in some conspiratorial way – it was just very easy to typecast me, because that’s the easiest thing to do. I didn’t do anything to perpetuate it. I was just being myself. Breathing air, having feelings, doing things that didn’t have anything to do with any of that shit, but it was easier to make a cartoon of me.”
  Did the creation of that cartoon cause him to second-guess himself, and his work?
  “Absolutely,” he nods. “Absolutely. It totally affected me. It totally sidetracked me, caused me great harm and great anxiety. Those are my issues, it isn’t anybody’s fault, it’s just that. . . you can take the high road, you can choose to ignore these things, but the world will change around you. I tried that, but you just walk into these situations much easier.”
  And is this why it sounds like you’d rather be Ryan Adams of The Cardinals, rather than Ryan Adams and The Cardinals?
  “It’s not a withdrawal,” he insists. “I’d been in a band before [Whiskeytown], but it didn’t work. In my long journey, the entire time I’ve been playing music, I’ve been looking for something where I could be collaborative. I’ve always hated the sound of my own voice. I’m just madly in love with the process of making music and writing songs.”
  With that, Adams and his skateboard have an appointment at a nearby park. For all the anxieties he radiates – he also admits to suffering stage fright – his year, and counting, on the wagon seems to have done him good.
  “I have more energy,” he agrees. “But all my writing in the past was done during the day, when I was able to be serious, and I don’t think sobriety, or lack thereof, was interfering. Maybe I haven’t had a revelation yet, but that part of my life hasn’t changed. The way that I write, at the speed that I write, the amount of notebooks full of verse, always would have been impossible under duress.
  “If anything’s changed,” he says, “it’s that I’m a bit more mellow about it all.”

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