The Life of Ryan - Ryan Adams Interview

Accuse me of journalistic laziness all you want, but two hours before I’m due to talk to American indie star Ryan Adams, I tweet the following request for questions: “Interviewing @TheRyanAdams in a couple of hours. Anything you’d like me to ask him?”

Numerous people respond with suggested queries varying from the meanings of various songs to who are his favourite Irish authors to what was it like living in Manhattan’s fabled Chelsea Hotel. Somewhat cheekily, a certain Anne McCoy (@annemccoy) asks, “Does he hate it when people think he’s Bryan Adams?”
This sparks a totally unexpected tweet from @TheRyanAdams himself: “No, it’s a compliment. He’s one of the coolest people I ever met.”
So begins an impromptu online Q&A that sees the 39-year-old, Jacksonville-born musician responding, informatively and often humorously, to almost 20 questions from delighted fans. The best is probably his reply to Nick Viveiros’s query, “Does the music or lyrics come first? How does he write it?” Adams tweets back, “Same time. I do ‘automatic writing’. Songs arrive at the door rainsoaked & blurry. I let ‘em in & dry ‘em off’.”
This online session continues almost right up to the moment Adams picks up the telephone in his Pax Americana Studio (better known as PAX AM) in Los Angeles, and rings this writer at home in Galway.
We’ve never actually met before, but I feel like I already know him. “Well.. that was fun,” I say.
“Yeah, it was,” he laughs down the line. “I just happened to be on Twitter and I saw you asked other people what to ask, and I thought it would be really funny just to answer them before you could ask me.”
Do you often interact with your fans on social media?
“Not really,” he muses. “But once in a very long
while... sure.”

One of the most prolific artists working in contemporary rock ‘n’ roll, Ryan is calling to discuss his soon to be released, self-produced and self-titled new record. Although he has recorded three studio albums with alt. country outfit Whiskeytown, and five with The Cardinals, Adams is undoubtedly best-known as a solo artist. Since the release of his 2000 debut Heartbreaker, he has usually averaged a new album every year along with producing others for artists such as Willy Nelson, Jessie Malin and Fall Out Boy, and collaborating with the likes of Counting Crows, Weezer and Beth Orton. However, Ryan Adams is his first studio release since 2011’s well-received Ashes & Fire.
Fourteen solo albums in, why have you chosen to self-title this one?
“I honestly could not find a title,” he sighs. “It was really embarrassing. All my ideas for a title were downright stupid. You know, it’s fun to have fun with the title first, before it’s serious. I don’t know if people always do that, but I always do that. When it got down to honestly trying to find a real title, nothing worked, and I kept more and more feeling like it needed to be self-titled.
“I’ve always been really suspect of people who self-title albums,” he adds. “I never fully understood how they got to that place. It was a really interesting experience to get to that place where it seemed obvious to me that it should be self-titled. I mean, there were other reasons that later justified it being self-titled even more, but once I sort of let that idea in, it felt right, you know?”
Often loud and raucous, Ryan Adams is essentially a straightforward rock album. He has stated that it was heavily influenced by The Smiths and Velvet Underground, but at times it’s more reminiscent of Tom Petty - the Heartbreakers’ keyboardist Benmont Tench III plays on it. But given its title, would it be fair to say that this is a particularly autobiographical collection of songs?
“Yeah, I mean somewhat,” he says. “They kind of all are.”
He sounds a little distracted.
“You know what? I’m having a little trouble hearing you today so I’m going to call you back on my cellphone.” He hangs up and calls back 30 seconds later. “I’m sorry about that,” he apologises. “I’m really hearing-impaired.”
Adams famously suffers from Ménière’s disease – a disorder of the inner ear that can affect hearing and balance. It caused him to take a break from touring lately, and is largely responsible for the unusual (for him) three-year delay between his last album and this new one.
“I don’t think you can cure it,” he explains. “As far as I know, it’s genetic. It turns out that my father had it, and my younger sister, but they didn’t even know until I started talking about it publicly.”
Is it like vertigo?
“That’s one aspect of it, but I wouldn’t call it vertigo, like you’re up on a building and your knees become weak – although there’re elements of that. It’s really difficult to describe, for me and for other people that I’ve talked to who have symptoms. You know when it’s coming on: you can tell by a pressure in your ear. It’s like you have the flu, only without any flu symptoms, and it’s accompanied usually by a whole lot of nausea and dizziness. Things go to shit really quickly. When I experience it I feel like my bones weigh hundreds of pounds inside my skin, like I can’t adjust to gravity. It’s really fucking weird.”
He recently admitted to Rolling Stone that he’s been using medical marijuana to alleviate the symptoms.
“It’s really helped me,” he enthuses. “I was never a big pot-smoker in my entire life. I was too busy fucking doing tonnes of other drugs (laughs). When I was a teenager and in my twenties, I was into being a total shithead. There’s nothing more fun than to be back there, playing guitar, staying up late, scoring – I don’t know, it’s very clichéd, for the kind of people who do what I did, it’s very clichéd.
“But about five years ago I was in bed for about a month, and somebody close to me said – I guess I didn’t know that they used marijuana – ‘I’m really sad to see you suffering and I never would normally do this, but I bought you these cookies and I feel like they’ll make you feel better’. And I was really suffering, and I wasn’t taking anything either. I didn’t want to go on steroids, I didn’t want to go on painkillers, because that’s just another kind of suffering. So I ate a little bit of this cookie and I really fucking slept. I just felt so much better.
“And whatever it does, I can’t explain it: it’s all very mystical to me. My whole mind, body and spirit kind of connect, and that sort of feeling off-balanced, it just sort of washes away a little bit. I can get a leg up and I can go for a run, and get my adrenals working again. It’s just right. It’s truly an unbelievable help.”

Working in PAX AM, he and his band reportedly smoked countless bowls of marijuana throughout the recording of Ryan Adams. Curiously, though, it’s not a mellow album...
“It isn’t mellow,” he concurs. “That’s interesting.” There’s a short pause as he considers this, before he asks, “So do you think that the idea of an enlightened experience, do you think that energy is lost energy, rather than static energy?”
From my own experiences with marijuana, I’ve always found that the prospect of any kind of ‘enlightenment’ always depends on what’s going on in my life – and my head – at the time.
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he says. “I found for me, past the point of the physical aspect of marijuana working in my system to ease my symptoms, I really think it opens me up. Like, on the other side, there was so much blocked energy, so much musical energy, that had never really been unleashed, and I very much got to a place where I was so completely in a non-medicated state, that I have very much moved the boulder away from my mind, but the physical manifestation of it still exists in other things. I could see them and visualise them and move them away.
“Like, I looked at the electric guitar one day, and I thought, sitting in my studio, that it was like a magician’s wand. I truly saw power, and I was so excited to revisit that – and it pays me back with even more beautiful energy. When I play acoustic guitar now, I can hear it exactly for what it is, and I can hear it so much better, too.”
Marijuana-induced enlightenment aside, having recorded and produced so many albums over the course of his music career, is there sometimes a wearying sense of ‘this is just my job’ or is there always still something special about the studio experience?
“The idea of the construct of an album is sacred to the listener, but the practice of songwriting is sacred to the writer,” he avers. “Albums are sacred to me as a listener, because I’m on the other side of the experience. I’m there to shut up and listen. But creating an album, it puts that person in the kitchen, they are responsible for creating a meal, for nourishing, and so the plate has an entirely different meaning when you are putting food on it and serving it to someone with, hopefully, love
and attention.
“Whereas when you’re on the other side of the experience, you’re taking it in so much, so you might see the imperfections, but it’s harder to see the perfection of the love that’s being nourished in that way. Songwriting is a practice and it’s sacred. It’s a gift. I am being given energy, and I am made aware of things, and I’m drawing an awareness and I respect it. It’s an ever-changing but beautiful thing for me.
“So a lot of the stuff that’s happened, it’s awesome that I got there. Bu, in some ways, finally having my own studio to make records in, I’ve realised I’m probably better served to do this stuff myself. There is an urgency to what I want to say. When I get into my car and drive to my studio, it’s only ten minutes from my house, I feel fucking excited every time. It’s like I might as well be a 15-year-old kid getting access to an electric guitar for the first time. It’s always there, I’m really grateful for that. It just couldn’t be more beautiful than that.”

Outside of his musical activities, Adams is also a respected poet and short-story writer, with two published collections to his name, 2009’s Infinity Blues and 2010’s Hello Sunshine. He maintains that while rock lyrics and poems have some things in common, they’re still quite different beasts.
“I guess rock ‘n’ roll, the way it operates, it’s a little bit dumber, it’s like a puppy,” he says. “Songwriting and music can be extraordinarily profound, and change people’s lives. What’s weird is that, in rock ‘n’ roll, there are poets, there are people who you can really say they’re sacred writers, but interestingly enough, I don’t know if I could tell you who was the KISS of poetry, or who was the Dead Kennedys of poetry.
“Those two disciplines are very different. When we talk about the way that Morrissey writes, or Nick Cave or Tom Waits, people say they’re really poets, it’s like we dignify them by saying that, but often in poetry you don’t hear so much like, ‘This guy is like the Iron Maiden of poetry’. Which, I have to say, I feel like poetry could use a little more of that. But it really is pretty sacred; they both are.”
Adams has a long day of promotional interviews ahead of him, and apologetically explains that he has to go. Just before he hangs up, I ask him how he feels about the fact that he’ll be turning 40 this November.
“Well, I mean, age is just a number,” he ventures, after a brief pause. “I think 40 would be a milestone, just in a ‘you only get to turn 40 once’ kinda way, but I haven’t really thought much about it. Turning 30 was far weirder. When I turned 30, it was like ‘what the fuck happened?’ Yeah, it’s interesting, I think at 30, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m 30 now!’, but saying that like a 20-year-old. I would hope that, at 40, you’re moving, or that most people would be moving, into a place of lighter days. Yeah, I don’t really feel any different. Maybe that’s a good thing.”

Ryan Adams comes out on Pax-Am/Columbia Records on September 8.