Clash Music

Once the roguish alt.country pin-up boy, Ryan Adams transgressed the depths of his dark side in the midst of a creatively fertile spell that would read like postcards from the edge. It was his enduring faith for music that ultimately saved his soul, which has brought him out the other side and finds him somewhat of a calmer spirit, far from the petulant rock star many feared would prevail.

‘Easy Tiger’ is his latest offering, a pensive and at times bleak report on modern life as Ryan Adams, which has triumphed through the days of excess following his solo breakthroughs ‘Heartbreaker’ and ‘Gold’, the all too personal revelations of ‘Love Is Hell’, which dealt with the death of his girlfriend, the critical mauling of the aptly titled ‘Rock And Roll’, and 2005’s trilogy of releases that soundtracked his lowest ebb.

As Clash finally encountered its capricious hero, old wounds had healed and the time for revelations was nigh.

‘Easy Tiger’ sounds fantastic. How was the making of this album for you?

I always have fun in the studio. It’s always good to write. I sort of took my time this time, I guess. Wrote a little bit, recorded a little bit, took some time off, you know?

All your albums are cohesive in emotions and feel like chapters of your life, or certain moments in time. Do you write and record albums to help move on from certain feelings or to document your feelings for future reference?

Well, I guess I’m probably just a bit inspired by my writing technique, whether I’m writing fiction or narrative stuff that isn’t music. I wouldn’t say it was directly influenced by any specific writer, but some of the stuff that I write most is usually narrative writing. Probably things like – not content wise – but in the writing style of Miller, or for that matter Susan Sontag - people that wrote just basically essays and things, things about what they knew about. So I don’t really sweat details much for records. I think that in order to make a good record you should probably not be thinking about making one. I don’t really do any tricks, I just try to be honest. My life hasn’t necessarily always been good. It’s usually filled with a lot of compact moments of drama and long moments of boredom, and hopefully there will be some good things in between, you know?

There’s a song on your new album, ‘The Sun Also Sets’…

That’s a killer track. I love that track. I really put my fists up in front of my face in that track. I don’t think it was quite done when we had first presented it to the folks – the people who manage me who I really love a lot. I really asked for their help this time. I was like, ‘Look, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing’. I had too much on my mind. It was one of the ones that I really wanted to make it, and it took some hard work to get it into shape.

The lyrics are quite harsh, a stark slice of reality. You sing: “We are only a moment from death”. Are you a pessimist?

As much as anybody is. I would think that I’m probably able to write from a pessimistic viewpoint, but I think in order to sing a pessimistic song you must be somewhat of an optimist. Otherwise you would just think, ‘What’s the point of singing this song?’ I’m maybe a bit of both. I think I naturally question the world around me and my place in it and what it’s supposed to mean.

Another great song is ‘I Taught Myself How To Grow Old’. What did you mean by that?

That’s a tricky tune, because it can mean a lot of different things, I think. I’ve heard it back since and it was shocking to me that it was as blunt as it was. I think the emotional activity in that song is more talking about not just myself but the way that a person can, when they’re younger, aspire to being older, aspire to feel in some ways more like their heroes. In my late teens and through my twenties, the people that I admired and the people that I looked up to in my life were older. My grandfather, for instance, or some of my musical heroes or literary heroes or people to me who were heroic who were artists. They were people who were older and lived a more sophisticated kind of life. And some of the pain associated with that, some of their problems, which were adult problems, I think that somehow it seemed like a romantic notion to take those on as a young man. Just by writing that song, it was some way of admitting or figuring out that it wasn’t necessarily the right decision, you know? It’s kinda like be careful what you wish for. If you decide that you wanna live like Tom Waits or something, so you wanna move to the dark side of the street or live in the back of a barroom or feel their feelings, then you’re in your early twenties by the time that you would have had the experiences of the spring or summer of your life. You might end up in a bit of a darker place than you expected.

Your album ‘29’ marked your departure from your twenties. Did it serve as a cathartic parting gift?

I think that that record is really, really scary when I look back on it, because I was very depressed. It was a concept record from front to back. I don’t think I’ve ever revealed this, but I’ll tell you because I have enough space from it where it’s interesting. It was the first of the three records that were released in the one year that we made. ‘29’ was the record I wrote while my wrist was healing from my fall [his wrist broke after he fell off stage in Liverpool], but it was written on a computer with just one hand because my other hand was completely immobile. I had to relearn how to play guitar and everything, so by the time that I went back to write songs – before ‘Cold Roses’ and ‘Jacksonville City Nights’ – I was in a lot of pain and I couldn’t make it go away. A lot of it was physical pain and some of it was psychic pain, but I think that record to me was sort of what would happen in a person’s mind if they’d finally reached a place where they were sad enough to end their own life, and they’re looking back on it as they’re slowly fading away. So, the way that that record was built was me documenting what it would be like imagining myself if I was dying, and the last things I would be thinking about is the last scenarios that would play out my head, all related to very personal things in my life… It’s a very, very, very, very destructive and strange record, but that had a lot to do with the fact that I did damage myself. It took six months to even recover just from the surgery and the post-surgery physical rehabilitation had begun on my wrist and I wasn’t even able to push a pencil. I think I kinda saw my whole life flashing before my eyes, at least my creative life. So with that record, I was being creative by expressing what it would be like to go through a physical death as I had gone through a creative death.

The songs on ‘29’ were apparently supposed to be 9 minutes long, but were cut short by your label, which wasn’t the first time they’ve interfered with your plans…

It was initially supposed to be the first of the trilogy – ‘Cold Roses’ being the second and ‘Jacksonville City Nights’ being the third. The idea was that ‘29’ would be the creative death and the death so to speak of a certain part of myself as an artist and ‘Cold Roses’ as a rebirth sort of, like coming out of that darkness, then ‘Jacksonville City Nights’ as the third in that trilogy was like a really hard reflection, tackling subjects from the past that I could never really get to the heart of in the way that I wanted to, which I think I successfully did on that record. But the way that they did come out was ‘Cold Roses’ first, then ‘Jacksonville City Nights’ and ‘29’ third was mainly because I think the label did not like the album at all. It’s true; I’m not making anything up that they wouldn’t tell you, but they didn’t think that it had any business being released. So they decided to just release it third and bury it in the December releases so that maybe nobody noticed it came out and wouldn’t make a big fuss about it. I don’t even know if I got paid for it! But I did demand that it came out. As for ‘Love Is Hell’, they refused to release it as an album, and then they released it as two EPs, omitting all these songs – it’s still missing five songs but, you know, what are you gonna do? They’re the bank and I’m a guy, you know?

The label made you release ‘Rock And Roll’ in favour of ‘Love Is Hell’, but it was the latter that ultimately fared better. Did you feel like saying to them, “I told you so”?

I’ve been told that it only sold 30,000 copies – a disaster. But I don’t care. It’s not a disaster to me. I just think that records belong in the world and I’m just trying to write in a form. If I’m a dinosaur novelist to them, fine, but either way I still have to do my work. It feels like my calling, it feels correct to me to work in this form. Once in a while you have to do something weird. I mean, ‘Rock And Roll’ is… I’m like more or less making fun (laughs) of the entire situation about not being able to release a record that I care so much about, and they’re like, “Well, we need a record that’s commercial”. Every second of that record ‘Rock And Roll’ is a total and complete lie, none of it means anything; it’s all bullshit. Every song is like a rip-off of a style of another band with a title that should almost be comedy. It’s kind of evident.

There was a great quote I read online that said, “These days it takes almost as much time to be a Ryan Adams fan as it does to be Ryan Adams”. Do you enjoy the frantic game of catch-up you get to play with the obsessive of your fans?

I never think about its value in my own lifetime, and I also don’t like to overthink what it’s worth. You know, I wanted to do this so bad my whole life. I wanted to write; not just be a writer because it sounded cool, but I really liked the idea of being in a position of looking at the world, observing my emotions, how I responded to it, being fascinated by the fact of just being alive. It’s a tremendous experience for me, as it is for anyone, but I’m enamoured by the experience in such a way that I really don’t know anything else. It would be unnatural for me to not want to sit down and try to…um… At this point it’s not even making sense of the world, my writing, it’s a bit more daring, interesting stories, sharing my fascination with all of it. It always feels kind. Even when the writing could be cruel, when the subject matter is dark or tense, it still to me feels like a very good thing to share. I ultimately think that everybody probably goes through these same feelings, same discussions, same romantic feelings, same type of confusion, and I guess my job – if I have one, if I’m able to keep my job – is just to be honest about what it’s like for me. And then what happens to it afterwards really is just up to a person if they want to invest their time in it and if they find similarities to their own life or it explains something that maybe they couldn’t explain. Or maybe they just hear a song and they go, ‘Oh, I’ve felt like that before’, you know? I think it’s a good place to be. I personally look forward to every day that I get up and the typewriter’s sitting there and I’m always happy to see it, I really am. Something funny always comes out of that thing, and a lot of the time it’s something I didn’t even know that I knew or something that I didn’t even know that I was gonna think about. It’s kinda wonderful.

Words by Simon Harper

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