Ryan Adams just released his fourteenth solo album in fifteen years. It’s self-titled, not because it represents a new phase of his career, though such narratives are tempting (he is now married, stable, mostly sober), but because, as he told Stereogum, he couldn’t think of a name for it. That’s not to suggest that Adams is running out of words. The eleven songs on the new album could have easily been a hundred. Adams, who turns forty in November, records in his own Los Angeles studio, going there every day, Monday through Friday, to make new music. He described one workday recording session recently to the Telegraph: it included several on-the-spot jams, a fake country song called “Don’t These Clouds Look Like Jesus,” and a couple of songs that made it onto the new record. Such days are not uncommon: “It’s recreation, it’s craft, it’s ritual. When I turn that faucet on, the water comes out. It’s like the flow of life.”
A faucet. That image speaks to the prodigious output of Adams’s songwriting, which dates back to 1995, when he recorded the first of three albums with Whiskeytown, a short-lived but foundational alt-country band. In the two decades since, Adams has recorded two hundred or so mostly first-person love songs. Whether played simply with an acoustic guitar or loudly backed by a full band, they’ve mostly been sad ones. “Lover, why do you leave / On the day I want you for me?” he sang on “Heartbreaker,” his acclaimed solo début, from 2000. “With this key, scratched into my arm / I spell out your name, it’s ringing in my head / Like a false alarm,” he sings on the new one. Love is still—as one of his songs puts it—hell.
The notion of a faucet also connotes passivity, as if Adams were merely a medium, a delivery device for the music. He has been both celebrated and derided for being a kind of human jukebox of Americana, spouting Gram Parsons, the Rolling Stones, Paul Westerberg, Neil Young. The music could seem like the work of a certain kind of savant, the uncanny mimic. What has saved it from novelty has been Adams’s cohesive, longitudinal lyrical sensibility—unabashed lovelorn whispers and shouts—and his urgent, charismatic voice.
On “Faithless Street,” a song from the first album that Adams made with Whiskeytown, he sings what might be an ur-text for making sense of his sometimes erratic career: “So I started this damn country band / Cause punk rock is too hard to sing.” It suggests that his music has been a product of uncomfortable compromise. As a public figure, he has been notably combative—squabbling with critics and other musicians, turning in some lousy live performances, changing labels, cancelling tours—as if playing a role of punk-rock excess. This persona, what Pitchfork once called “his churlish, fuck-off swagger,” has been in sharp contrast to the earnest open-heartedness and gentleness of many of his songs. This conflict exists in the music, too; albums like “Rock n Roll,” from 2003, and the recent EP “1984” are loud and propulsive, with the guitars turned up and Adams’s voice, the talent that has earned him his fans, turned or dumbed down. In interviews, Adams says that he doesn’t listen to the kind of music that he is known for, and talks mostly about metal bands.
Yet there they all are: Adams’s tender, raw love songs. There are overflowing handfuls from his Whiskeytown days and his solo albums: “Call Me on Your Way Back Home,” “Cry on Demand,” “Why Do They Leave?” “Love Is Hell,” “Please Do Not Let Me Go,” “Stop Playing with My Heart,” “I Love You But I Don’t Know What to Say,” “Come Home.” And, on the new album, tracks like “Kim” and “Let Go.” The intimacy of Adams’s songs has always been enhanced by the fact that he sings them in the first person; his catalogue seems like memoir. Adams produced the new album himself in his own studio, and he’s discussed the joy of being finally free of the meddling hands of producers. While the album may represent a new independence, it sounds mostly like other good Ryan Adams albums. If you got dumped tomorrow, you’d find it to be especially fine company. Still, how many sad songs can an artist release in a lifetime before they begin to blend together, like a Pandora station for heartbreak?
There is also an essential conflict, not unique to this fan-artist relationship, between the aching sincerity of Adams’s songs—and the sincere feelings that they evoke in the listener—and the seeming insincerity that Adams evinces about his work. He is not gracious about the past, or about the albums that his fans like best. Of his widely beloved “Heartbreaker,” Adams told Stereogum, “It really was a folky, Dylan-y style. That’s not me. I am those songs and that’s me, but they’re dressed up in a certain way.” The way that Adams has recorded so many songs, and tossed aside so many more, suggests that the whole thing comes easy to him. (One of the tracks from his 2007 album “Easy Tiger” is called “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.”) His best songs suggest turmoil and struggle, and so it’s hard to hear that the process of making them is so light, and that he regards them as simply disposable. Of course, it’s not fair to deny Adams the joy of making music, or to hold him or his process accountable to our own expectations. Just because we’ve listened to his sad songs alone in the dark doesn’t mean that he recorded them there. “Songs are really just ideas,” he told Pitchfork, in 2004. “Putting little ideas into motion and giving them a little bit of spit and polish and maybe a little bit of heart if you’re lucky.” It sounds like fun.
When I saw Adams play about ten years ago, the performance devolved; he acted erratically onstage, missing cues and losing songs in the middle of his verses, to the obvious frustration of his bandmates. They eventually walked off the stage, leaving Adams shambling after them. The show, it appeared, was over. But then, after some time, Adams reappeared, alone with an acoustic guitar, and, as if a switch had been flipped, played a coherent and captivating set of his acoustic heartbreakers. If he was wasted, or faking it, it didn’t matter. There was sincerity in the music if not necessarily in the performance. As Adams sings on the song “Love Is Hell”: “I could be serious, but I’m just kidding around.”
