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Ryan Adams: Grows Up, Pulls Air, Moves Forward with The Cardinals and Respects His Muse
Words by John D. Luerssen
From his sordid and impulsive past—which counts a dark history of calling out audience hecklers, phoning up rock critics who didn’t quite get his work to give them a rash of hell, not to mention the great deal of time he’s spent with Hollywood starlets and Manhattan socialites—I expected that Ryan Adams would keep me waiting. And because such behaviors have always somewhat unfairly overshadowed his music, when he finally gets down to talking an hour later than planned, I’ve already formed the opinion that I’ll be speaking with yet another rock star asshole.
But seconds later that perception is shattered as the 32-year-old songwriter/artist apologizes profusely for keeping me waiting and offers a valid excuse for his tardiness. It seems Adams—the man responsible for nine acclaimed solo albums, including the newly minted, genre-bending Easy Tiger, a forthcoming box set of unreleased material spanning his solo career due later this year, plus his heralded tenure fronting alt-country icons Whiskeytown—has mangled his arm at a new skate park, just blocks from the Brooklyn residence of Jon Graboff, his guitarist and steel-player in The Cardinals.
“It’s not broken,” Adams says with a sigh, safe-housing his injury with a makeshift ice pack at Graboff’s pad. “I was skating and I slammed,” he says with the exuberance of a 15-year-old skateboard junkie who just got vertical. “I was pulling air today for the first time in many, many fucking years. It was so amazing. But that last one, I had significant air, about two feet. Not mind-blowing, but for me it was. Then I hit the transition—a big, burly, nasty clover-shaped pool—and when I hit the third leaf, which was like an eight-deep, sixteen foot bowl with a couple feet of vert...that was it.”
No, you’re not reading Thrasher. And yes, it probably seems peculiar that a man known for writing some of the best songs of his generation, on hands that have already seen their fair share of punishment, is willing to be so risky. After all, it was Ryan Adams who fell from a London stage into an orchestra pit in January 2004 breaking his wrist. Yet Adams—who has a renewed interest in skateboarding, a fascination of his from half a lifetime ago—has always been taken chances with his art by hopping across rock’s subgenres with aplomb.
Easy Tiger, his latest and possibly last, proper solo album, defies convention in that it doesn’t stand thematically or musically as a defining moment like most of his solo work. Whereas 2000’s Heartbreaker was a folk masterpiece, 2001’s Gold was a successful, Grammy-nominated pop/rock disc, 2002’s Demolition blew the dust off of secret treasures, 2003’s Rock & Roll and 2004’s Love Is Hell flirted with punk and adult alternative formats respectively, and his trilogy of 2005 discs, Cold Roses, Jacksonville City Nights (both recorded with The Cardinals) and 29 pitted Grateful Dead-like jams against stark ruminations on turning 30—album number nine is an assortment of most of the styles he has conquered before.
Which means Easy Tiger plays to all of Adams’ strengths. From the memorable, sophisticated mid-tempo winner “Goodnight Rose” and the gorgeous blue-eyed soul ballad “Everybody Knows,” to the tender Neil Young-flavored “Off Broadway” and the disc’s lone rocker “Halloween Head” (which finds him delightfully if not wryly beckoning “guitar solo”), the album is an exhilarating sampling of the Jacksonville, N.C.-reared artist’s wares.
In describing the stylistic shape of Easy Tiger, Adams says, “We [including guitarist Neal Casal, drummer Brad Pemberton, Graboff, bassist Chris Feinstein and producer/pianist Jamie Candiloro] just took direction from what really excited the band. Some of the songs are as old—or older, than Heartbreaker, and some of the songs were as young as a week old when we tracked them. It’s more like what would make best sense. The only theme this time out was kick ass tunes.”
“I told Ryan, you’ve got to think of the album like a playground with a bunch of kids on it. They’ve all got to get along,” Graboff interjects. “One malcontent comes in, and it will foul up the whole thing.” To which Ryan counters, laughing, “That’s true. It only takes one really jarring track to upset an entire album.”
Easy Tiger breaks with tradition in other ways. “I didn’t sequence it…and I didn’t even pick the tracks,” Adams confesses. “It was done by a democratic process with The Cardinals’ management office. They all listened and picked what they were really excited by. Some of them weren’t even demoed. They were just, like, live things we could listen to, or the most rudimentary recording on a boom box. It was something new for me to allow for some outside influence. And it was, in fact, really helpful. I think for this record, I kind of felt like I’m not really a band leader. I kind of have to be to make The Cardinals work and make that vibe work, but I can sometimes serve the band more by looking for direction outside of myself. It isn’t about me being unable to successfully sequence a record or come up with something with that part-theme. In fact, those are some of my strengths, but I think I can almost follow up on a thematic type of record to a fault.”
When asked why—when he insists The Cardinals were so instrumental on Easy Tiger—the band didn’t get a formal billing on the record, Adams snaps back, “You know I wish I could answer that question.” But before he can get too upset, he and Graboff break out in a fit of laughter. “Hold On. We’ve sprung a leak in the ice bag,” he chuckles.
“To be honest, I didn’t even want it to be called my name…but I know it’s not a fight worth fighting,” says Adams. “It wasn’t like it was imposed by some dramatic gesture. And in the future the plan, in all honesty, is to just be in The Cardinals and that’s it. I really don’t want to do solo records anymore, and one of the things that I had to do to make that a reality was to honor my commitments to the label [Lost Highway]. I mean, the kind of record that I was being asked to make was a Ryan Adams solo album. And the best way that I could do that in my mind was to approach the band and say ‘I don’t want to do that.’ I got very discouraged, only because my head is so in The Cardinals’ realm. And every person in the band was so supportive and was like, ‘You should do it. You should do it because it’s the way forward.’ So when I sat down to do the solo record, the best people I could think to do it with were The Cardinals.”
“You know, I think it might come as a surprise to some people about how little amount of ego gets displayed within The Cardinals,” says Graboff in Adams’ defense. “Lots of ideas and lots of songs get thrown out all the time…and some are adopted, some are accepted and some are made fun of, molested and ultimately discarded. But the bottom line is that everybody is much more interested in playing music together than they are in who gets credit for what. So when Ryan asked us to do this solo record, our attitude as a band was, ‘Who cares as long as we get to collaborate.’”
“These are sort of the last moves that I need to be making in the situation that I’m in with Lost Highway,” Adams maintains. “So if they wanted a really stripped down record from me, whatever, I’m fine with it. Maybe they thought it would be easier to market it under my name. I don’t care. I don’t ego trip. But I really think I’ve done enough solo records. This is a nice way to cap off my time in this place with this label. And the good thing about it is, I’m not going to tour without this band. All commitments will be honored in a peaceful, awesome way. And I’m glad. I’m kind of happy to be getting off of this solo thing. I’m pretty sure that after this album and the box set, I’m just done; I won’t do anything else unless it’s collaboration.”
Past Adams discs have featured collaborations with everyone from Norah Jones and Gillian Welch to Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, Emmylou Harris and Smashing Pumpkins/Hole vet Melissa Auf Der Maur. On Easy Tiger, pop star Sheryl Crow sings on the lilting confection “Two,” because Ryan says, “I am a huge fan of her tunes. She’s a great songwriter…she can rock a bass and she’s as hot as Georgia asphalt.
“Neal and I were looking for a third part harmony,” Adams explains. “We were thinking of how the band might bring in a third voice, and I think it serves the song really well.” When indie music websites first reported Crow’s participation on the track, they erroneously dubbed it a duo and offered a typical dose of unctuous remarks. Adams was New York-pissed.
“They love to slam me and anyone who has anything to do with me,” he acknowledges, “because I work real fucking hard. I think people take it as a personal affront that I’m creative. But I’m not doing it to say ‘Look at me. I’m better than you.’ It isn’t even about that. I love working. Anyway, screw that site. They have to compete with internet porn and Star Wars fan sites. Star Wars fan sites are way cooler.”
When it’s pointed out that Easy Tiger houses some of Adams’ most lucid vocal deliveries ever, with nary a Westerbergian growl to be found, the singer/songwriter denies it being part of any master plan. “The vocals that ended up being the most usable were the ones where I was cutting it in with the record,” he says. “I can’t stand overdubs, and I don’t like listening to playback on my voice and doing comping and things like that. This was mainly done in one take. My thing is I run out of patience and then I’m done. And our Jamie [Condiloro, who has worked with R.E.M., The Cardinals on Willie Nelson’s Songbird and The Eagles] will tell you, I run out of patience quickly with vocals. Even when I’m in a producing situation, like when I worked with Willie on Songbird, my feeling is, “Let’s get the first take right.’”
Although he admits Songbird didn’t turn out entirely the way he wanted, he still desires to return to producing again. “It’s definitely a nice discipline to learn, and it’s interesting to empower others,” he reveals.
During the course of crafting Easy Tiger, Ryan admits listening to extreme metal- like Voivod when he wasn’t fixated on old school hip-hop like Eric B and Rakim, EPMD and Big Daddy Kane. “I’ve been making music for so long,” he explains, “that the music I listen to and the music I write are two totally different things.”
He also grooved on Jay-Z. “He has clarity, he’s got vibe, he’s got soul,” Adams says. “And you know the guy’s not making it up…he probably does have a helicopter. I know if I had a helicopter, I’d figure out a way to write a song about it.” Clearly in an improved mood, Adams begins to sing a song made up on the spot with a chuckle, ‘Big helicopter/sad helicopter…’”
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When the prolific songwriter befriended prolific, best-selling horror writer Stephen King, the end result was that the legendary novelist not only signed on to write the liner notes for the forthcoming box set, but fired off the bio that accompanies media copies of Easy Tiger. “Stephen is outrageously cool,” Adams asserts. “And once Jamie and I are finished with it, he will be the first person to hear the box set. I felt 20/20 needed liner notes in an old-school way like a classic jazz or blues album—to augment the experience of the record or talk about how the tracks unfold—and he agreed to do it.
“I’m just a huge fan of his, and it should be fairly obvious because I slip in a lot of Stephen King references into my records,” Adams continues. “Love Is Hell represents that in spots. He’s just a bad ass dude. He doesn’t give a damn if people trash his novels in half. They always trash him because he works harder and twice as fast and has more valid ideas than many people know how to deal with. The work speaks for itself. He works like Rollins and Black Flag and The Minutemen—a punk rock work ethic, which is, ‘Get out of the house!’ When I actually needed a bio for the record, I figured I’d ask him. So I was talking to him while I was walking around trying to find a Philly cheesesteak. The phone rings, and I’m talking to this dude and he’s so cool. I’m out for part of the afternoon and when I got home, he had already finished it.”
Equally productive, Adams likely sees some of King in himself. Adams writes songs every day and says he has the job that he wanted ever since he picked up a guitar as a kid. “I actually traded what at the time was my only skateboard for a guitar that belonged to a buddy of mine,” he says in a story that brings his life and art full circle. “It had this little speaker built into it. He had gotten it for a Christmas present but never touched it. And every time I’d go over his house I’d learn something new. Ever since I picked it up, I just knew this was the job for me. So it seems really wrong to just not work. I live my work. I don’t live and die by my work, but I think I’ve paid a lot of dues to be able to do what I’m doing.
“I may not have paid all of my dues, but I’ve had plumbing jobs and I worked in a bread factory—which was really tough,” Adams continues. “I did that while I was doing bands like The Patty Duke Syndrome in Raleigh over 10 years ago. And ever since I’ve been able to write full time; it’s never been a drag for me. It’s my life’s work. I get up and think, ‘I’m so happy that I get to stay in and write.’ It brings me such tremendous joy because its physical, it’s tremendously creative and it’s selfless. In a lot of ways I have to hand over my conscience to tap into new ideas. The whole process is really about how to further communicate and get ideas into the world that maybe I didn’t even really know. Songwriting can be a lot like meditating, but it isn’t an ego trip. It isn’t about that for me. It’s about being excited. It reminds me of skateboarding or going to the movies, all the things that I get excited about. It’s a pretty dark world. There’re a lot of bad days in a life, and it seems to me that I can think of thousands of other things…destructive and hurtful things…that can occur in life. So I’m really happy to share my stuff. I think maybe the world would be a little less nasty if people realized that they can make art.”
Despite the fact that he’s performed countless times on stages throughout the world, the man behind the tunes on Easy Tiger still finds it a little intimidating to get up there night after night and face his fans. “The world these days is pretty much designed to trash people straight on,” he confesses. “And I guess it’s about insecurity, but I guarantee you that at a concert hall, 95 percent of the time the people onstage feel some kind of anxiety. It’s like dropping in on a big half pipe, every time. But once I’m up there playing music with my pals, I can really get into my groove. But each night is different. There are a lot of different people out there in different moods, and you never know what you’re going to get—whether it’s going to be a nice, sunny day or a fucking tsunami. I’ve played some shows that are just frightening. It can be intimidating. It’s strange to get shit from your quote-unquote fans. We don’t play anything remotely political or controversial, but people get so damn strung out about it…when all we’re looking to do is have some fun.”
In keeping with that notion, the near future will see The Cardinals gearing up for a massive fall tour. “You see, I hate festivals,” Adams says, “because there are no soundchecks, which is bad for every band. You get a big paycheck but I think it’s a big screw job for the fans. That’s why I’m planning on two sets this fall with two different band situations…acoustic guitars, steel, piano and a little drumset like in the The Grateful Dead Reckoning-style for a 28 song set…and then a second electric set that sounds almost like a whole side of Cold Roses that we’ve never played, and even stuff from the Gold and Love Is Hell eras that no one has ever heard. So, I have a feeling by the time autumn rolls around, The Cardinals might be opening for The Cardinals with two different vibes in one night. I think of how much ground we could cover. It would be really fun and a bit of a challenge, which is something I pride myself on.”
As for the 2007 Christmas present du jour for all his disciples, Adams is truly ecstatic about the project. “For the first time it looks like it is going to be more than an idea,” he exclaims. “Maybe around Demolition or the Love Is Hell era, it was a possibility, but it didn’t really come to pass. When a record comes out, you never really know how busy you’re going to get and sometimes all of your attention has to go there. And now it seems like a really good idea. When I spoke to the guy [Luke Lewis] who runs the label, we agreed it seemed like the right time. There’s already so much from the past that, for anyone who has ever watched it as a mini series, enough of the plot has been unraveled…it’s going to be good to show people the connections between all of my records…because there’s more or less an album between every record, and any person who’s ever bought any of the records I’ve made, [would regognize] like these little missing sequences—these records that happen in between—that may or may not have been as interesting, but are actually more like Easy Tiger. It will be more defined by tunes and less by the themes in between them, because it was the thematic pieces, those grand gestures that I put more of the argument into, as opposed to handing in the 12 best songs I had at the time. Luckily enough, I finished all of those projects and they weren’t shelved in a negative way, but put there like canned goods. So I can open them up.”
As for the actual art of songwriting, Ryan Adams candidly opens up about what works best for him. “I don’t try to perfect my craft, ever,” he explains. “The limitations in the way one person sees the world and their music is what makes what they create so much more interesting. Over-editing is senseless. People always tell themselves, ‘I need to edit more. I need to edit more.’ Whatever. You need to work more.
“Another thing I suggest,” he continues, “is to write as much in your head as you do on the guitar or whatever your instrument might be, because there’s a lot of good in there too. Sometimes I let stuff linger in my head and just ferment up there and then when I decide to let it out, something amazing develops. Or I’ll dream up a tune and I won’t rush to write it down. I’ll keep it in my mind. Or maybe I’ll write down one idea, stick it in my wallet and pull it out later.
“Also, if you get writer’s block, write about that,” he adds. “Truly! When I made Love Is Hell I had writer’s block, and there are parts of that album that are about coping with it. And you should always respect the muse. Always respect your muse, whatever it is. If there’s a place or a thing that inspires you, it’s okay to dwell on that or draw from it. You can write about the same thing 15 times, and you’re just coming at it from all different sides.”
Adams also suggests that if you’re an accomplished guitar player, to try writing on bass or piano, “because the notation will be so interesting and by utilizing the secondary chords, you can push more melodies through.”
He also reveals that one of his tricks when he writes a new batch of songs is to make a list of words from grocery store romance novels. “I scan the book without really reading it for clusters of word forms like, ‘And then she dropped her hat,’ Or ‘It was a dark night.’ I underline them and make a list of phrases that end up triggering me. Then I go back and try to fill in words around them to find my way back to the story I want to tell in my lyrics. And even if I haven’t gotten to my original point, I’m left with something so open; it alludes to something much grander than I originally wanted to say, which could have been something as simple as ‘I think I’m hungry’ or ‘I wonder if that girl wants me.’
“I’m not one of those people who believes there was something in the air or a song can just come to me,” Adams insists, speaking on his unique approach. “That’s really a bunch of bull. It’s really about how much time you spend on your craft. It’s okay to be spiritual and it’s very important to be spiritual about art. It is some form of manifestation. But for me, and this is what I learned from hardcore and punk rock, it is that everyone has that power—if they want to manifest art. It’s just an amount of confidence and the willingness to let yourself go. It’s really about getting access to yourself. But it isn’t that some fishermen catch more fish, it’s about wanting to spend more time on the lake, or in my case, more time getting vertical.”
At one point, he was talking strange, and he asked why he was talking like Nick Nolte, prompting him to dedicate "I See Monsters" to "Nick 
This Is It, Shallow, So Alive, Luminol, Burning Photographs...
That's the first song on the disc too, so when I first put the CD in, I was thinkin', "Uh-oh...". I wouldn't be surprised if it grows on me though, it has potential...but I'll probably focus more on the other tracks first.
