lucasadams
06-29-2007, 04:56 AM
Here you go people i thought for those who have not read it, got the paper today to find this in there...
RYAN ADAMS - Easy Tiger
Rating ****1/2
“THIS record is 100 per cent sober,” says Ryan Adams of his new album Easy Tiger. “Everybody grows up at some point or another.”
In an astonishingly honest interview, the maverick singer from North Carolina describes how he kicked the booze and drugs that have dogged his recent years.
“I was actually sober for quite some time before anybody actually asked me,” he explains. “Outside of my very close group of friends, including the band, I didn’t think it was important to anybody.”
He says he never intended to harm anyone with his excesses but “at some point, it started to damage others and it got in the way of my work. It sounds really f***ed up but I didn’t enjoy it at all.
“If I could have woken up playing and writing music and then fallen asleep again, that’s what I would have done. But it just wasn’t set up that way, so I spent my time turning myself into nothing.
“I thought no one cares what happens to me at the bar. I could fall into a nihilistic cave which I would return from each day. It was basically the gym for me, the disappearing gym.”
New record ... 'Halloween candy for starving children'
Of his life now, he says he’s slightly terrified but he’s beginning to discover there’s “some other s*** out there” to become interested in.
It’s clear that Ryan is one of the most complex characters making records today but therein lies the fascination. He admits he is easily addicted. Coke and Dunkin’ Donuts currently replace the booze and drugs.
He’s also highly emotional. There’s so much passion in his performance that sometimes you wonder if he can get to the end a song without breaking down.
And he’s bursting with ideas. Nine albums since 2000 suggest an intense, wandering spirit always a breath away from a masterpiece.
And it didn’t take a genius to work out that the new sober Ryan is not in the best of moods when he arrives at his West London hotel — something about his room — to discuss Easy Tiger with SFTW.
The 32-year-old, who lives in his beloved New York, is flanked by the four members of his backing band The Cardinals and his producer Jamie Candiloro (a vivid person with mad hair and buckets of charm).
Rather stupidly, I begin by telling Ryan I’d just read that Easy Tiger wasn’t the album he wanted to make, that his record company asked for a solo album but he wanted a band album. The interview gets off to a bad start.
“That’s not true. That’s a misquote,” he rages about a British music magazine. “I suspect I could have said anything and they would have put it together to say what they wanted. I won’t be speaking to them again.”
It brings back the hurt he suffered when his record label Lost Highway didn’t want to release his dark but magnificent Love Is Hell album back in 2003. They did, eventually, but only after Ryan delivered the throwaway indie rock pastiche Rock ’N’ Roll first.
“There would have been no Rock ’N’ Roll,” he explains. “It’s no mystery that it’s one of the f***ing funniest records anybody has ever made. As a bit of a laugh it’s fine.”
And, as Ryan explains, the label “loved it”. “It might as well have been Halloween candy for starving children. They couldn’t believe it. I don’t remember the direct quotes but it was something like, ‘This is the one. We really got something now.’ In my mind, I was thinking whatever you like.”
However, he adds: “I would have been very happy and proud of Love Is Hell. I would have worked my ass off and supported it because I believed in it. Someone decided the record was unworthy of being put out. I don’t know who. I wasn’t communicating with them. I worked so f***ing hard on that album that I could never explain in a million years.
“My conviction for what it was was so extreme that its rejection affected my personal life, my artistic life. It rendered me useless. But it also caused me a great amount of anxiety and depression. Even if it sounds slight to someone outside of my life, I don’t give a f***. But I almost never recovered. I don’t think I really have. It made me less of a dreamer.”
Ryan’s demeanour immediately brightens when it comes to talking about the recording of Easy Tiger and what actually happened this time round. The album simply bears the name Ryan Adams, reflecting Lost Highway’s wishes, but The Cardinals’ fluent country sound is all over the album.
“The general consensus was that was the best place musically and spiritually and even for the business side to go. I can more or less be happy and thrive in any kind of vibe. Although it wasn’t the record I thought I was going to make, I am profoundly happy that I took this direction.”
Despite writing 2000’s exceptional, stripped-down, painful, beautiful break-up album Heartbreaker and following it with intimate, heart-rending acoustic performances, the singer can’t ever imagine repeating the formula.
I ask him if he would actually consider performing on his own right now.
“Absolutely no f***ing way. You couldn’t pay me. Well, you could give me a million bucks and I’d do a half-assed job and say, ‘Thank you very much’. Then I’d say, ‘Guys, let’s go buy some helicopters and ninja suits’ and ‘I’ve got my little DVD camera, let’s make a movie’.” On Easy Tiger, songs like Oh My God, Whatever Etc and Off Broadway could be from Heartbreaker. Country-inflected efforts such as Goodnight Rose and Tears Of Gold sit happily with his Cardinals albums Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights. The hilarious Halloweenhead rocks like parts of Gold without quite venturing into Rock ’N’ Roll territory.
Ryan says of the new songs: “I am playing and singing in such charming company. Even with the tracks I did basically myself, Jamie was inspiring the hell out of me. I’m a happy camper because I’m doing what comes naturally to me, which is playing the guitar or playing the piano or singing some tunes and feeling the moment.”
I just manage to sidestep the question that irks Ryan the most. Does he find it a problem being so prolific? Instead, I ask how he copes with such a vast body of work and which bits he feels able to still draw on.
“I was going to put my stock answer on that. There’s 1,816 responses and I’ve only used 100 so far. It (his songwriting) is like a monster library. It’s f***ed up. I love it. I love it. I’m so proud of that idea chamber. It doesn’t really exist but it does. I can go to it. Neil (Casal, band leader and guitarist) can go to it. Hell, everybody in the band goes to it at some point. I can see when someone’s going to go there, they start messing around with their instrument and go into this imaginary room and come out and go, ‘Phew, look what I found’.”
His relationship with his songs is so intense that some songs do get a little too painful. “They are very emotionally-charged tunes. You guys (the band) probably don’t understand why I had a reluctance to sing some of the older or newer material because some of it is so heavy for me. Just the words and what it takes to sing them. I don’t ever want to sing them half-assed. I don’t think I could. Singing without feeling is like playing a guitar without strings.
“Sometimes, I only have energy to hit that one emotional place once a day because I let it wipe me out. I’m not a profoundly good singer or songwriter (He’s so wrong there!) and I have many records but I am nowhere near where I want to be. I’m just glad to be in the game. Like my favourite punk records by Hüsker Dü or Black Flag, all I got to do is f***ing mean it and it will ring like some huge bell. It’ll be real.”
Ultimately, Ryan’s in a good space in 2007 with an excellent new addition to his canon and clear mind free from the chemicals he used for his own brand of escapism.
“I’m just a singer and I feel you ought to put me in a flight case after the gigs,” he says. “I mean, I go with all the guitar stands and amps.”
The complicated strife of Ryan has been replaced by a happier, simpler life.
RYAN ADAMS - Easy Tiger
Rating ****1/2
“THIS record is 100 per cent sober,” says Ryan Adams of his new album Easy Tiger. “Everybody grows up at some point or another.”
In an astonishingly honest interview, the maverick singer from North Carolina describes how he kicked the booze and drugs that have dogged his recent years.
“I was actually sober for quite some time before anybody actually asked me,” he explains. “Outside of my very close group of friends, including the band, I didn’t think it was important to anybody.”
He says he never intended to harm anyone with his excesses but “at some point, it started to damage others and it got in the way of my work. It sounds really f***ed up but I didn’t enjoy it at all.
“If I could have woken up playing and writing music and then fallen asleep again, that’s what I would have done. But it just wasn’t set up that way, so I spent my time turning myself into nothing.
“I thought no one cares what happens to me at the bar. I could fall into a nihilistic cave which I would return from each day. It was basically the gym for me, the disappearing gym.”
New record ... 'Halloween candy for starving children'
Of his life now, he says he’s slightly terrified but he’s beginning to discover there’s “some other s*** out there” to become interested in.
It’s clear that Ryan is one of the most complex characters making records today but therein lies the fascination. He admits he is easily addicted. Coke and Dunkin’ Donuts currently replace the booze and drugs.
He’s also highly emotional. There’s so much passion in his performance that sometimes you wonder if he can get to the end a song without breaking down.
And he’s bursting with ideas. Nine albums since 2000 suggest an intense, wandering spirit always a breath away from a masterpiece.
And it didn’t take a genius to work out that the new sober Ryan is not in the best of moods when he arrives at his West London hotel — something about his room — to discuss Easy Tiger with SFTW.
The 32-year-old, who lives in his beloved New York, is flanked by the four members of his backing band The Cardinals and his producer Jamie Candiloro (a vivid person with mad hair and buckets of charm).
Rather stupidly, I begin by telling Ryan I’d just read that Easy Tiger wasn’t the album he wanted to make, that his record company asked for a solo album but he wanted a band album. The interview gets off to a bad start.
“That’s not true. That’s a misquote,” he rages about a British music magazine. “I suspect I could have said anything and they would have put it together to say what they wanted. I won’t be speaking to them again.”
It brings back the hurt he suffered when his record label Lost Highway didn’t want to release his dark but magnificent Love Is Hell album back in 2003. They did, eventually, but only after Ryan delivered the throwaway indie rock pastiche Rock ’N’ Roll first.
“There would have been no Rock ’N’ Roll,” he explains. “It’s no mystery that it’s one of the f***ing funniest records anybody has ever made. As a bit of a laugh it’s fine.”
And, as Ryan explains, the label “loved it”. “It might as well have been Halloween candy for starving children. They couldn’t believe it. I don’t remember the direct quotes but it was something like, ‘This is the one. We really got something now.’ In my mind, I was thinking whatever you like.”
However, he adds: “I would have been very happy and proud of Love Is Hell. I would have worked my ass off and supported it because I believed in it. Someone decided the record was unworthy of being put out. I don’t know who. I wasn’t communicating with them. I worked so f***ing hard on that album that I could never explain in a million years.
“My conviction for what it was was so extreme that its rejection affected my personal life, my artistic life. It rendered me useless. But it also caused me a great amount of anxiety and depression. Even if it sounds slight to someone outside of my life, I don’t give a f***. But I almost never recovered. I don’t think I really have. It made me less of a dreamer.”
Ryan’s demeanour immediately brightens when it comes to talking about the recording of Easy Tiger and what actually happened this time round. The album simply bears the name Ryan Adams, reflecting Lost Highway’s wishes, but The Cardinals’ fluent country sound is all over the album.
“The general consensus was that was the best place musically and spiritually and even for the business side to go. I can more or less be happy and thrive in any kind of vibe. Although it wasn’t the record I thought I was going to make, I am profoundly happy that I took this direction.”
Despite writing 2000’s exceptional, stripped-down, painful, beautiful break-up album Heartbreaker and following it with intimate, heart-rending acoustic performances, the singer can’t ever imagine repeating the formula.
I ask him if he would actually consider performing on his own right now.
“Absolutely no f***ing way. You couldn’t pay me. Well, you could give me a million bucks and I’d do a half-assed job and say, ‘Thank you very much’. Then I’d say, ‘Guys, let’s go buy some helicopters and ninja suits’ and ‘I’ve got my little DVD camera, let’s make a movie’.” On Easy Tiger, songs like Oh My God, Whatever Etc and Off Broadway could be from Heartbreaker. Country-inflected efforts such as Goodnight Rose and Tears Of Gold sit happily with his Cardinals albums Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights. The hilarious Halloweenhead rocks like parts of Gold without quite venturing into Rock ’N’ Roll territory.
Ryan says of the new songs: “I am playing and singing in such charming company. Even with the tracks I did basically myself, Jamie was inspiring the hell out of me. I’m a happy camper because I’m doing what comes naturally to me, which is playing the guitar or playing the piano or singing some tunes and feeling the moment.”
I just manage to sidestep the question that irks Ryan the most. Does he find it a problem being so prolific? Instead, I ask how he copes with such a vast body of work and which bits he feels able to still draw on.
“I was going to put my stock answer on that. There’s 1,816 responses and I’ve only used 100 so far. It (his songwriting) is like a monster library. It’s f***ed up. I love it. I love it. I’m so proud of that idea chamber. It doesn’t really exist but it does. I can go to it. Neil (Casal, band leader and guitarist) can go to it. Hell, everybody in the band goes to it at some point. I can see when someone’s going to go there, they start messing around with their instrument and go into this imaginary room and come out and go, ‘Phew, look what I found’.”
His relationship with his songs is so intense that some songs do get a little too painful. “They are very emotionally-charged tunes. You guys (the band) probably don’t understand why I had a reluctance to sing some of the older or newer material because some of it is so heavy for me. Just the words and what it takes to sing them. I don’t ever want to sing them half-assed. I don’t think I could. Singing without feeling is like playing a guitar without strings.
“Sometimes, I only have energy to hit that one emotional place once a day because I let it wipe me out. I’m not a profoundly good singer or songwriter (He’s so wrong there!) and I have many records but I am nowhere near where I want to be. I’m just glad to be in the game. Like my favourite punk records by Hüsker Dü or Black Flag, all I got to do is f***ing mean it and it will ring like some huge bell. It’ll be real.”
Ultimately, Ryan’s in a good space in 2007 with an excellent new addition to his canon and clear mind free from the chemicals he used for his own brand of escapism.
“I’m just a singer and I feel you ought to put me in a flight case after the gigs,” he says. “I mean, I go with all the guitar stands and amps.”
The complicated strife of Ryan has been replaced by a happier, simpler life.