Defying the niche
Ryan Adams discusses the mythos that pursues him
by ben Corbett (buzz@boulderweekly.com)

In exchange for Leonard Cohen, an old girlfriend gave me Ryan Adams. It was a pretty good trade. She used to call me up and sing Adams' "Be My Winding Wheel" into the phone with this sexed-up, lemony coo, bordering on tears, and I'd lean back in the chair and let the tentacles of her voice strangle me. It was powerful and sweet, and there's really no finer way to get turned on to new music. Especially Ryan Adams, who comes to people in much weirder ways.

I almost forgot about him until a year later when driving down the Georgia interstate with Kirk West, the Allman Brothers' road manager. We were drifting along, listening to Dylan's live '75 Rolling Thunder when Kirk said, "Do you know about Ryan Adams?" Well, yeah, I told him, and we proceeded to hash over the young alt-country singer-songwriter. It was an exciting conversation. This was in 2005, right after Adams released Cold Roses, an album top-heavy with Grateful Dead-slash-Neil Young flourishes that even prompted Dead bassist Phil Lesh to stop just shy of calling Adams the closest thing to Jerry Garcia incarnate.

"I really like him," said Kirk about Ryan.

"Me, too," I said. "But do you think he's for real?"

"Yeah, I think he's for real," said Kirk.

Being for real is important. At least for certain members of a certain tribe that spends most of its time searching for a pulse (even a faint beat) in a music industry that's been crawling along in limp mode since the rock 'n' roll orgasm of the '60s and '70s. It is a confused industry today, desperately trying to pluck the next Elvis from a clump of navel-gazing niche bands in a karaoke culture, where the Next Big Thing is anyone's guess and where anyone with a pocketful of lyrics can plant a handful of songs on MySpace and harvest a couple hundred fans.

Not that any of this matters to Ryan Adams, who in his own anti-fashion way, and in spite of himself, seems to take pleasure in shunning the Elvis robe, and who probably won't be throwing guitar picks out to adulating groupies with a flash of tongue any time soon. But you never know. The tongue thing may come in handy for Ryan someday, when the media starts thinking they've got him figured out. A little darting of the tongue would throw everybody off.

To date, his niche has appeared to be one of defying niches, something like the Neil Young Geffen years, but with a purpose neither reviewers nor fans could quite put their fingers on.

"I don't know, man, I'm just playing some tunes in a couple of different styles," Adams explains over the phone. "I write on a couple of different instruments, and I listen to records a lot. I suppose it's about being in a different head space than I was at another time."

Where does the inspiration come from?

"Just the world around me," he says. "It's always changing. There's always something new. There's always something to be excited about. There's always something heavy that you want to try to understand in some way. In my own dumb way, I just try to immortalize these little moments where I don't know everything."

Beginning with the 2000 release Heartbreaker — his first solo effort after the demise of alt-country band Whiskeytown — Adams began tapping the styles, mixing genres, from country to rock to punk, post-punk, folk, you name it, and along the way gaining many labels: the next Dylan, the next Gram Parsons, and most likely his personal favorite, chameleon. The critics either flatter or fleece him, and some even chalked this stylistic leap-frogging up to a fear of success and a self-destructive streak that culminated in show cancellations when he broke his wrist in 2005.

"You know, I broke my wrist," Adams explains playfully. "I had to do what anybody else would do to get back to being strong again. It wasn't an emotional or intellectual thing. An accident's an accident, so I think to intellectualize it as a precursor to some mythology is probably wrong. To me they were really just unfortunate incidents. And now I know when it's going to rain, because my bones start hurting. (Laughs) You break a bone, and you get your own personal barometer. Or it could be because I'm getting old."

Rumors and psychological profiles aside, what we do know about Adams is that he likes to explore, and he moves along quickly to the next thing. His fans are faithful wherever he takes them, and he's one of the most critically acclaimed songwriters out there. He's played with everybody: Emmylou Harris, Norah Jones, Phil Lesh, Willie Nelson, the Cowboy Junkies, to name a few.

A jammy favorite with a Grammy no doubt right around the corner, if his early country work with Whiskeytown had teeth, then his solo work released since 2005 with the Cardinals has gills. The latest, Easy Tiger, is arguably his most mature, most commercially accessible achievement to date. But behind the entire catalog (nine records so far, and with at least as much unreleased) lurks this eternal — what horror writer Stephen King called melancholy — that seems to say, "Check out these scars. They're just like yours."

"I'm self-critical like anybody is," says Adams. "I have the same kind of dynamic going. I do what I'm trying to do, and then I look at it and make sure it's going to mean something to somebody else. It can't just be about me. Sometimes I don't pass judgment on something I'm creating; I just let it happen. I'm critical of myself, sure, but everybody's got to be a little hard on themselves from time to time to keep everything moving, keep growing. You don't want to get caught in a rut. You don't get to grow if you get caught in a rut."

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