by Dave Simpson
Ryan Adams would like to make something very clear. "I never ever sat in a room in the dark, drooling, or whacked out alone for weeks at a time, shooting drugs," he says. "I never shot drugs intravenously. I never smoked crack. I was never on the street. I think really that stuff was very experimental for me: I was experimenting with my mind."
As Adams is painfully aware, he has a certain reputation. A decade ago, he was heralded as America's new country-rock superstar. His 2000 solo debut, Heartbreaker – which followed four albums with the alt-country band Whiskeytown – was rapturously received and the follow-up, Gold, clocked up 400,000 sales and three Grammy nominations. He was hailed as "the new Gram Parsons", had Steve Earle and Bono praising him to the skies and was called "a brilliant songwriter" by Elton John. Then something went askew. Reviews and sales of his albums got worse. He started falling out with labels and mistrusting interviewers, and got a reputation for being a boozy, druggy brat.
That picture is difficult to square with the Adams of today. Looking younger than he did in his late 20s ("I wasn't happy"), the 36-year-old is friendly and enthusiastic, happily making tea and offering a whistlestop tour of his new Los Angeles Pax-Am studio, which he has built with old analogue equipment used in famous moments of pop history. He gleefully details the provenance of the equipment: a Motown recording console, a mixing desk used by the Beatles and the Doors, Elvis's engineer's old vocal mics. "And these," he beams, "are the speaker mains used on Master of Puppets!"
This is the environment that has produced Ashes & Fire, a new album of heartbreaking, beautiful songs that pick over the embers of his wilder life in a mood of becalmed, mature contentment – qualities that can spell trouble in music, but which here have produced possibly the album of his career. "I'm hearing that and it's shocking," he smiles. "But I'm glad that is translating. I'm having a nice time, and I had a nice time making the record." According to Adams, the legendary producer Glyn Johns took control, which allowed the singer to relax. He also renewed his long-term relationship with Johns' son Ethan (producer of Heartbreaker and Gold), who sent him Laura Marling's I Speak Because I Can, which he'd been working on. Hearing Marling offered Adams the challenge he needed. "I thought: 'For fuck's sake,'" Adams smiles, his piercing blue eyes peeking from behind a flop of raven hair. "I literally threw out 80% of what I had. And it felt good, to ask: 'What am I really capable of?' I felt competitive again to write great songs."
Ashes & Fire would have been impossible had Adams not been able to change his life. Five years ago he was diagnosed with Ménière's disease, a degenerative condition affecting hearing and balance. "All the stuff I was doing exacerbated the disease," he says. "You're not supposed to smoke, you're not supposed to drink alcohol, be stressed, eat salty foods." Anything else? "You're probably not supposed to do speedballs," he adds drily, referring to the cocktail of heroin and cocaine that killed John Belushi and River Phoenix, among others.
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