The Forum, north London, November 2003. Ryan Adams arrives on stage with his band and tears into a setlist that includes tracks from his sniffily reviewed latest album Rock N Roll. The year before, at Brixton Academy, he'd been electric throughout, but tonight something isn't clicking into place. After a while he stops, admits to all and sundry that "this sucks", and pulls the band into an on-stage huddle. When they begin again, it's the most remarkable in-the-moment reboot I've witnessed at a gig, real victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat stuff.
By the end of last decade, Adams had won himself a bit of a reputation as an erratic, sometimes downright antagonistic performer. It's likely that part of this was caused by the effects of Meniere's disease, the inner-ear condition that nearly ended his career. By the time I saw him at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in April 2012 - completely solo this time - treatment had taken a positive turn. He'd settled down, got sober, married actress Mandy Moore. And he was ready to deliver another magnificent live performance.
I've come to think of that tour and the album that preceded it - the stripped back Ashes & Fire - as the third chapter in Ryan Adams's musical life. First came the Americana origins with his band Whiskeytown. Then the century turned, and Adams became both prolific and profligate, throwing out albums including the career high of Gold and several backed by The Cardinals. Ashes & Fire, released in October 2011, marked a new, more mature beginning.
In the three years since, he's worked as a producer (Jenny Lewis, Fall Out Boy, Willie Nelson), formed a punk band and, by all accounts, ditched a low-key follow-up to Ashes & Fire, also produced by Glyn Johns. But he has only released one album - and done it not only under his own name, but titled with his own name too, even though it's more consciously a band record than its predecessor.
The reference points on Ryan Adams (the album) are more 1980s American rock than the country-folk style we've come to associate primarily with Ryan Adams (the man). There's something of later Rolling Stones in the soul-rock pacing and stab guitar chords of Gimme Something Good and Stay With Me, while on Trouble and Am I Safe?, he seems to have temporarily relocated to Laurel Canyon for a sound that's more AOR than anything he'd have attempted a decade ago.
The quieter melody and electrified guitar strum that opens Kim reminds me of The Replacements in their more placid moments (or perhaps post-split Paul Westerberg is a truer comparison), but the songwriter who looms over My Wrecking Ball and I Just Might, with its chugging guitar, is clearly Bruce Springsteen on his early solo records. The former is a Springsteen song title through and through, although The Boss would use it as a metaphor for the socio-economic impact on blue-collar America; for Adams, it's about personal demolition.
Lyrically, Adams takes us to dark places inside himself on this album ("It feels like fire/broken glass and wire") but gives us hope that he's moving into a more positive frame of mind ("I'm tired of fighting/I don't understand it all"). This is not a young man's music - Adams will, after all, turn 40 in November - and even the steady drumbeat on both Shadows and Feels Like Fire sounds like the heavy tick-tock of life passing by. It's incredible, though, that Ryan Adams is still writing songs as good as these when so much has poured out of him in the past. This vessel is far from empty.
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