To Hell And Back

It’s becoming a bit of a cliché when it comes to Ryan Adams, but you really never do know which of his incarnations is going to turn up – be it live (good natured three-hour marathons or forty minute narks?), on record (fragile acoustica or searing rock?) and now, for hotpress at any rate, in person. Any worries are immediately dispelled, however, as Adams reveals himself to be in spectacularly good form, despite several days of talking about himself to various European journalists. He looks well too, younger and fitter than I remember and resplendent in New Wave get-up of skinny black jeans, red and black checked shirt and black tie.

No confusion here then, unlike the mess that has surrounded the follow-up to 2001’s all-conquering Gold album. First there was last year’s Demolition, a round-up of various unreleased tracks. Rumours flew around of a complete four track re-recording of The Strokes’ Is This It? Then in March this year it appeared that the official follow-up, Love Is Hell, was due for release, but nothing happened. To be honest, Ryan, I’m just a touch confused. He shrugs apologetically. “Me too.”
So what happened? “I don’t know, I think people got scared. It’s a pretty weird record and I think I handed in a record – and I can say this proudly – that scared the shit out of my label. It was just fucking dark and twisted and sad and morose and not at all of any tempo. I think they just didn’t know what to do with it.”
Was it a problem with Lost Highway or higher up the commercial ladder? He looks a little sheepish, aware that it is these multi-national paymasters who are flying him around the world and making this all possible.
“Honestly, I’m not trying to make anyone villains because I’m trying to give them the benefit of the doubt but, for where I was going and for all the steps that I took to make the record, they didn’t really get any advance notice of this thing that I was creating. As ethereal or euphoric as the guitars can get on Rock N Roll, take that kind of vibe, slow it down and apply it to folk music or to the style of Galaxie 500 or Low or Elbow… it had that vibe. Although I was transcending a bunch of things that I wanted to express by trying to find a different voice I think it seemed obtuse to them and shocking. Which is good. In retrospect it wasn’t such a bad thing that they didn’t know what to do with it.
“I started making Rock N Roll after falling out with them for a brief time,” he continues. “I just took my credit card to a studio and said ‘I’ve got money; I’ll record an album myself’. They got murmurs of that, got interested and when they heard the new record they saw that it was a means to an end of getting to another place.”
The temporary differences appear to have been papered over however, and this dark and twisted record will see the light of day spread over two EPs – the first of which will ironically appear on the same day as Rock N Roll gets released.
Adams seems sanguine about the whole thing.
“It felt like a record that didn’t have a centre, it felt like floating in space. There wasn’t anything that stood out and said this is what the record is. I felt that it was the themes of the record that really scared them more; there was a third person view of a suicide scene; a description of a very morose, empty house; several songs about ghosts and being one. I was so proud of it because it was such a destructive record but in retrospect if I had toured it it would have killed me because it is the most ungodly, fucking horrible thing. It’s depressing for just me to listen to let alone have to sing it every night.”
The recording of Rock N Roll became something of a reaction to these events.
“There was a letting go. Once I got all that stuff out of my system I was able to fall back into a place where playing electric guitar and just being natural about it was the simplest thing for me to do. All those immediate demons and craziness had been exhumed into these songs. I was truly in that kind of state before and had to do something about it. I’m twenty nine in a couple of weeks and it was the last of those mid-twenties crazies… maybe there’s more to come, I don’t know. I always hoped that they just thought it kinda sucked but then I don’t think they’d let me release it on the same day as the album.”
It all reminds me a little of the situation that Prince found himself in a while back, a comparison that isn’t lost on him.
“I thought about it the other day. I heard one of his recent records and he sounded lost but it sounded kind of cool too. He just went back into his house and said ‘I’m going to make music’, and I felt good for him. In a way, I think he has some Dylan in him because he is staying true to his path as a musician. At some point if you come to a feeling that you’re mastering a place that you’re at, you have to quest after different ideas and patterns so that you can remain a student of music. As soon as you reach that level of comfortability it’s in your best interests as a musician to then branch off, to keep seeking. Some might say that that is pretentious but nothing really feeds artistry apart from that. I think the idea is to find a different view of something and find a different way to interpret it.
“I knew that I wanted to go and play guitar,” he expands. “I knew that I had feelings and thoughts and jokes to tell. The title itself is a punchline. It mirrors the mere thought of rock’n’roll. Instead of me looking at me, I’ve turned it round and looked at my record collection. I feel that as long as I’m open to whatever the creative impulse is at that time and don’t have too many preconceived notions of where it’s going to get me, I’m in a better situation.
“There are a couple of ways to go about it, to write songs for effect or to not know what it’s going to be and let it tell you. That’s an age-old cliché, but it’s more interesting for me when I take the time to be ambivalent and leave those gaps. The more I back off, the more I learn about it. There have been times when sitting down and writing another stupid fucking song about how miserable I am has just been boring. I’m sure it’s boring for other people too but those feelings will come back and there will be different ways to express them.”
That freedom manifests itself in what is a fantastic record, one that buzzes and fizzes with life. It’s also as loud as hell. I tell him a brief story of two friends of mine – one who had only a passing knowledge of him but heard the album and loved it, another who is crazy about Heartbreaker and Gold but is struggling with this album’s punky overtones. If that was the overall balance of opinion would he be happy?
“You know, I really can’t rate myself on what people think about my art anymore because it’s too destructive. I have to stop rewarding myself on what my art means or how popular it is because that’s not the point. It’s really become too sacred for me. I’ve almost turned it into a backyard sport where it’s just something I do. I can’t live in my art anymore because I’ll go crazy.” He drops his voice. “I’ve already been crazy. I just do it and I just give it. I feel like letting people see what the results are, no matter what it is. Recently I’ve been thinking that no matter how weird my records are or what the concept is, it’s just creative and as soon as that ends I’ll close the door on it and do something else.”
That’s hard to believe, I tell him, because he comes across as someone who just lives for music. He smiles broadly.
“It’s so easy to have a crush on albums. It’s interesting to be analytical about music because you can find out so much about yourself. I am truly, a fan; it gets foggy, where ‘music fan’ stops and ‘musician’ begins. I try never to be on either side.”
It’s for this reason that Rock N Roll works so well, being clearly a labour of love rather than an exercise in bandwagon jumping. Yet even that doesn’t bother him.
“It’s OK if people want to do that too. It’s the passing on of the creative nature. Even if someone starts a band called The Ropes because they love The Strokes and it’s just crap it’s still OK because they’re obviously having fun. I don’t think that anyone would do art if it were painful to them. I try not to be too judgemental even with the worst of the worst of music because there must be an empathetic way to view it. It’s too easy to be nasty and there’s nastier shit to be nasty about than stupid rock records.”
As different as this record is from Gold, these are also very different times. When the latter emerged at the end of 2001 and pegged Adams in the classic American artist mould it wasn’t an easy time to be seen as such and have any kind of radical opinion. Was it a hard time for him?
“Not really. The perceptions were all there but the reality was not. It seemed to be that everything took a back seat. There was lot of confusion for a while. It didn’t matter if I was a baker or a roofer or a musician. For a good amount of time everybody was everybody. As things happened people naturally fell back into niches. Nothing on that record was done after that event; it was done four months before. Some people didn’t know that.”
The inclusion of the US flag on the cover had added overtones for many, if not the right ones.
“Mine was in distress. When a ship was in distress they flipped the flag but if it’s anti-American they flip it both ways so that the Stars are bottom right. My joke for the cover was that it was an ironic reference to Born In The USA. Not to be ironic about Bruce Springsteen, more to say where are all these singer-songwriter guys because I’m not one obviously. I felt that Gold was my own personal backlash against that singer-songwriter personality because the record has got all these weird kind of vibes on it. I think it was more conceptual to me than other people. The way that modern rock is now hadn’t really solidified.”
Time for the wind-up call and to give way to the next set of questions. As we make to say our goodbyes, Adams is still going, pontificating on the state of American music.
“From what I know from pop culture, we’re at a point where nobody knows what’s going to happen. The Strokes and The White Stripes have happened, Justin Timberlake became somebody you could like outside of the pop world. Things scramble, they get shook up and just like pieces of wood fitting into holes people find where they fit and it has to be shook up again. I probably fit in somewhere without knowing it but I’m trying to be aware enough to realise that I can still have my own overview of what my world is. I know this though, I’m not the one to shake it all up and make people try and figure out where to go. I don’t want to be one of those people. I’m just making records, sometimes records about records or about being a person who likes records.”
Pity anyone who tries to get in his way.

Rock N Roll is out now on Lost Highway, as is the Love Is Hell EP. Ryan Adams plays the Olympia Theatre, Dublin on November 16