The Strife Of Ryan

The way Ryan Adams sees it, the music industry is a lot like the birdhouse business. Allow him to elaborate. “If I want to go and buy a birdhouse for my garden, I don’t want to fucking go to a guy who’s built like, six birdhouses, because it took him four years to do each one,” he says. “I’d go a master craftsman who builds birdhouses because they are his passion.”

We are discussing Adams’ reputation as a workaholic and control freak. Since his 2001 break-out LP, Gold, the mercurial poster-child for alternative country has churned out albums at roughly the same rate the Greek government has been racking up unaffordable debt. There have been solo records, band projects (three in 2005 alone), even a surprisingly decent death metal sci-fi concept LP. The perception is that, by flooding the market, he is diluting the brand and squandering his talent.
Adams, whose latest release Ashes And Fire has been hailed as his most heartfelt and accomplished of the past decade, doesn’t share that view.
“I have never,” he insists, “regarded it as a negative to love what you do and to be serious about it. It's strange to me that anyone else would have that opinion.”
He's equally vexed by what he regards as the media’s ongoing campaign to paint him as a drug casualty. For sure, he had his wild spell, snorting speedballs (a mixture of cocaine and heroin) and going on solitary bar crawls during which he slammed so much whiskey it was probably dangerous for him to stand near an open flame. But that, he points out, was a loooong time ago. He’s been teetotal for approaching six years.
“I haven’t been to bars drinking since the winter of 2005. By 2006 I was sober. I never went to rehab. I never went to meetings. I don’t go to AA. I didn’t have to go to any kind of treatment. I didn’t think about it at all. It was less a part of my life than people make it out to be. To say I went off the rails was ridiculous. I’ve been sober since the middle of the last decade.”
From Adams’ perspective, such fast living was perfectly normal for a man in his 20s with the world at his feet. The only thing that set him apart from his friends was that he was in the public eye.
“I was a young musician. I was living the kind of life that people live and doing the kind of things that musicians do. Probably I wasn’t very different from a lot of other people. The big difference is that I was making albums and people were asking me questions. I was on the record and people were putting cameras in my face. I’m 36 now and that time has passed. It’s a cartoon caricature of who I really am.”
He hasn’t, it must be said, always made it easy for himself. In concert, Adams has been known to pull the old Bob Dylan stunt of mangling favourite tunes to underscore what an ‘authentic’ artist he was. When ‘New York, New York’ was adopted by grieving Americans as a post 9/11 anthem, he immediately forbade the song being used in any context relating to the Twin Towers attacks. His motives were pure – he was horrified anyone might think he was cashing in – but, in the context of what the country was going through, the gesture came off as mean spirited. And of course there was the infamous Bryan-gate affair, in which he ejected from one of his concerts a wag who requested ‘Summer Of 69’.
Matters came to a head in 2008 when his group The Cardinals fell apart and Adams was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, a painful inner ear disorder that can lead to deafness. You get the sense that all that time keeping the band together took a toll, that he needed to detox from being a rock star.
“The Cardinals were pretty burned,” he admits. “I don’t think they enjoyed working with me. Not that they disliked me exactly. We weren’t very collaborative.”
Three years later he’s back, happier and, by the looks of things, a great deal more stable. That’s despite the fact he's had to completely rearrange his life in order to beat Ménière’s. In place of speedballs and whiskey Adams’ daily regime now involves exercisve, hardcore power napping and the consumption of a mind-boggling assortment of vitamin supplements.
You might be tempted to ascribe the turn-about to his marriage to actress Mandy Moore, to whom he was hitched in 2009. We’ll never know how much of a part she played, however, as he refuses to discuss his private life (three separate record label people call before the interview to inform Hot Press that, under no circumstances, must Adams be asked about his wife – the inference being that he might call a halt to our chinwag). Just how sensitive he is about his personal affairs is made apparent when a routine question about the death of his grandmother, and its influence on the new album, sets him off on something of a tirade.
“I saw an article about that,” he sighs. “It seems to have been a secondary news source taken from a larger piece. What happened is that someone asked me about a song on the new album called ‘Save Me'. They thought it sounded like a break-up song. They weren’t inferring – it was a genuine question. In fact, it was about something entirely different – someone in my family being ill. I told the story [about the death of his grandmother] and it was perpetuated. These news servers rely on advertising – they don’t actually have the interviews themselves. They take music journalism pieces and paraphrase them. It would be inaccurate to say [the record is inspired by his grandmother].”
He's just as keen to scotch a quote floating around cyberspace to the effect that he was inspired to pick up the guitar again after hearing a new album by Laura Marling, who has been working with his long-term producer Ethan John. He admires Marling’s craft. As songwriters, however, they inhabit entirely different universes.
“I think I may have been a little misconstrued. I mean, obviously she is a fantastic songwriter and obviously a precocious and fascinating lady. Ethan sent me her record. I thought it was cool ‘cos I could really hear him on it. And it was nice to hear someone who was obviously very dedicated to their craft. That being said, it seemed to be that a lot of her songs are anti-romantic. She seems to be saying romantic people are intellectually-challenged. That’s not really my take on things.”

Ashes And Fire is out now.