Speaking to Hot Press last year, Ryan Adams expressed his displeasure at being endlessly portrayed as a drugs bum who had flushed his talent away.
“I was a young musician,” he said of his wild years. “I was living the kind of life and doing the kind of things that musicians do. Probably I wasn’t very different from a lot of others. The big difference is that I was making records 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 may protest. But it is undeniable that, when he should have been building on his best album, Gold, he was instead locked in a downward spiral of eccentricity and excess, releasing two, sometimes three records a year and developing a dangerous working relationship with speedballs, a mix of cocaine and heroin.
At 37, however, Adams is no longer a young man and, with midlife looming, appears to have weaned himself off his darker habits – his marriage in 2009 to actress Mandy Moore seems to have introduced some much needed stability to his world. That, at least, was the take-away from 2011’s Ashes And Fire, a moving, nuanced collection of largely acoustic songs that added up to the most constantly brilliant thing he’d done in a decade.
At a preternaturally hushed Olympia, he’s on a mission to recreate the record’s contemplative starkness. On stage it’s just Adams, stylishly unkempt with mussed hair and denim jacket, an acoustic guitar and piano. Between songs he is jovial, almost giddy, wiseacre-ing about the bleakness of his songbook (one anecdote, concerning a country music awards show threatens to last longer than the Avengers movie). It’s more than a shtick. Adams – who’d have believed? – has comic timing and a flair for hilarious self-deprecation.
All of which is a necessary counterpoint to the music, which can be unrelentingly serious. Stepping stoically through his catalogue, he performs the title-track from Ashes And Fire as a wistful dirge, his breathy falsetto floating about the introspective melody, then sits at his piano for ‘The Rescue Blues’, a favourite from his early years. He saves his best loved song, ‘New York, New York’ for the closing strait, singing it impressively and with the sort of humble directness his performances have sometimes lacked in the past (for a while he was infamous for mangling fan favourites, Bob-Dylan style).
At one point an iPhone goes off, the ringtone set to a retro ‘brrinng brrinng’.
“Wow, this place really must be haunted,” Adams says, glancing over his shoulders. “How do I know it’s a ghost? ‘Cos he’s using a rotary phone.” There may be restless spirits in the house tonight. But Adams demons are locked in a trunk somewhere, out of view, out of mind.