Ryan Adams

After nine solo albums and a forthcoming five-disc box set, Ryan Adams is finally putting his solo career on the back burner. Next for Adams? Working as a fulltime member of his current “backing” band, The Cardinals. Paste catches one of today’s most brilliant, prolific songwriters—sober for a year now—on the precipice of a new phase in his life and musical journey...

{PART I: WHAT IS}

Ryan Adams sits onstage in Memphis under giant spherical paper lanterns, illuminated by bluish-white prisms of light. The haunting changes of 29’s “Blue Sky Blues” drift from the speakers like an apparition before blossoming into the chorus, Adams bellowing the hook, “across the icy lake,” with such gravity you can feel the frostbite. He’s second from the left, little more than a silhouette hidden amidst the other musicians. It’s strange for a solo artist, especially one so alternately vilified and celebrated as an outlandish, attention-craving, drug-and-booze-fueled miscreant. But these days, it’s more and more obvious that Adams—spurred by the clarity and sense of purpose he’s found through sobriety and discovering his musical soulmates in the current lineup of The Cardinals—isn’t much interested in being the center of attention anymore.

While he says he may still occasionally record under his own name, after next year’s box set—which could be his last release on Lost Highway—his solo albums will be second priority. “I’m the singer in the Cardinals, no matter what it says on the marquee, or anything that’s going on now,” says Adams. “That’s how I view my world, and that’s where I’m going with myself spiritually.”

As the show continues, sheltered from the drizzly summer night outside the acoustically mesmerizing Germantown Performing Arts Center, neither Adams nor any of the Cardinals speaks a word to the crowd. Despite his loquacious past, when Adams sings, “Most of the time, I’ve got nothing to say,” from his most recent album, Easy Tiger, he delivers the line with a believable beat-down charm.

“If there’s a super-great audience happening, I don’t have to say shit,” Adams tells me a few weeks later. “I can just play, which is good. But sometimes you gotta be mouth. Sometimes you gotta tell a few jokes. It’s like weather up there. Sometimes it’s a stormy day, which is awesome. Sometimes it’s calm. Sometimes it’s partly cloudy. Every time I go up there, I feel like a farmer stepping out the back door to check the weather. The audience is a big part of it too, ’cause if they’re fuckfaces we will take them down. And it doesn’t take much, musically or otherwise.”

The set is saturated with songs from Easy Tiger and 2005’s Cold Roses, and the music has a timelessness and a primal sense of place, at times so open, free and spacious that the theater suddenly melts away, leaving those who’ve suspended disbelief in the middle of a cool grassy field under starlit skies, a faint breeze blowing past in the night air, carrying quivering notes that explode sonic color into thirsty eardrums.

“I have this weird fascination with this thing that accidentally happens at our gigs,” Adams confesses. “When we get into the E-zone, which is this weird place, songs start giving way to others that aren’t on the set list, and I just start following it. I can feel it calling. It’s like I’m leading, but really I make a suggestion and everybody usually jumps. Once we hit Deep Field, the “E” thing, a bunch of songs that start in different fret placements and octaves of E, that’s usually when this fucking bizarre music starts happening where I don’t know what’s going on. And as soon as I hear it open up, I jump all the way in, ’cause I know there’s no ‘feet-wet’ for this. You gotta go all-the-way wet, and then out a little portal to get back to land.”

Cardinals drummer Brad Pemberton—whom Adams affectionately describes as “a huge monster of a man, with inexhaustible timing”—pulls the band back from these chasms, dragging them to yet another term in Adams’ rock lexicon, The Plateau. “Once we’re at Plateau,” explains Adams, “it’s on. That’s when I’m up there going, ‘Fuck, man, don’t let this ever end.’ I almost start seeing the music visually. It’s very psychedelic and beautiful and transcendental and I don’t know anything else like it."

While most in the Memphis audience are extremely attentive, the lack of banter and the strange sonic forays connecting the dots between songs seem to irritate some fans, especially the ones drunkenly screaming for Adams’ most-requested tune, “Come Pick Me Up,” a breakup ballad from his lauded 2000 debut, Heartbreaker. (“So she took a couple records,” Adams later says of the song’s antagonist. “Big fuckin’ deal. I just made that shit up anyway. I stole her records.”)