Ryan Adams on using the power of music to turn pain into art
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There are a few things you should know about singer–songwriter Ryan Adams.
Firstly, he loves skateboarding.
Ask him what he's thinking when he gets up on stage in front of 2,000 people at a concert and he says: "Nothing."
"You know when you're skating in a concrete skate park and you drop into the bowl you don't think about anything? You just drop in and then everything is happening to you."
The second thing to know is he also loves comic books.
When asked what he thinks about Donald Trump's presidency, he chuckles heartily.
"I love comics, right. I keep thinking, when is the superhero going to come and save us from him?" he said.
The third thing you should know about this complex artist is he's had a love-hate relationship with the media.
In part, it can be explained by the fact his complicated love life has drawn interest from the kind of media you don't want to mess with, but even he would admit he can be difficult.
"I'm a Scorpio," he said. "It means I'm a bastard."
'I love music because my grandmother loved it'
All that makes interviewing him a potentially tricky business.
Where do you start? What do you ask that hasn't been gone over a hundred times before.
The question was simple enough — what was it that made him realise music was his big thing?
He sits back, clearly surprised by the question.
"That's an interesting question. No-one has ever really asked that before," he said.
"I love music because my grandmother loved it. It was a safe place."
The last phrase sits like an unexploded grenade.
He doesn't say it directly but clearly she offered safety from a fractured home life that saw his father abandon him and his mother treat him harshly.
Add that to an environment that he says only offered him a feeling of "desperate loneliness" and "an ominous presence" and it's easy to understand how important his grandmother was to him, and how her love of music would become his.
According to Adams they would drive around town together, while she did charity work, in a big, old "Batmobile-styled Plymouth Fury".
"My earliest memories would be that she always liked listening to the radio and she would say, 'Do you like this song?'" he said.
"She was always listening to something … she loved it so much, it's the safe place."
Little wonder, then, as he grew up, music would become his career and his salvation.
In the 1990s, he found success with an alt-country band, Whiskeytown, and moved to New York.
But by 2000, the band had fallen apart and so had his relationship of the time.
'I didn't have anything to lose'
He left New York broke and broken.
The future was bleak.
"I thought I'd have to get a job in construction, washing dishes, playing in bars sometimes," he said.
What happened next still surprises him.
He ended up living with a friend in his old home town of Jacksonville, just metres from his grandmother's house.
With her spirit so close, he produced what remains one of the greatest records of the past 20 years, called simply Heartbreaker.
Why the album touched so many people is still intriguing to Adams himself.
"I think it was raw, I think I didn't have anything to lose," he said.
"I was writing from a place that is so far from where my hopes and dreams were, as somebody who makes records."
The cornerstone of that record was a song called Oh, My Sweet Carolina — a duet with Emmylou Harris.
Adams says it was written for his grandmother.
"It's absolutely about her," he said, looking away wistfully.
Decades on he still holds her memory.
'I put my ass in the seat and write what's on my mind'
Adams's next album, Gold, made him a bankable star and everything looked secure.
But he didn't fancy being pigeon-holed.
That sent him to war with his record company and delivered him some bad press, with journalists calling him wilful.
Observers were left wondering whether he would he flame out.
He didn't.
Veering through periods of where he lost himself in drugs, struggled with emotional torment and intense hard work, he created a powerful body of work.
Over two decades he produced 15 albums and two books.
His music may vary but his intent never does; finding the truth in each song, each album, each artwork — like a mirror held to his face, for better or for worse.
"I put my ass in the seat and I open up the book and I write what's on my mind," he said.
"That's between me and the page, and that's the sacred time. I learned that lesson."
And he does a great cover as well
While Adams can write, he can also interpret a song like no-one else.
Last year, he made his own version of Taylor Swift's album, 1989.
Reviews were mixed but he is one of the few artists who could even contemplate such an audacious act.
Only a handful of artists too can take an already-famous song and make it their own.
Adams did in 2004 when he surprised almost everyone by recording an acoustic version of Oasis's Wonderwall.
Why did he try it?
The truth, as with so much of his life, he confides is much more complicated.
Having broken up with a young Englishwoman he loved passionately, he decided to record the song as an act of revenge.
"She loved Blur and she was there for the Blur versus Oasis war and I knew it would piss her off so much that I could play such a great version of that song … if I could play the most ridiculously great and sad version of that song ever," he said.
He pauses for a moment.
"And it really did make her very mad, which is great," he adds gleefully.
'This is why I do what I do'
Recently in Sydney, Adams performed his new album, Prisoner, with a full band playing to a selected audience.
It's a powerful series of songs about heartbreak and loss and it's easy to assume it's about his broken marriage to actress Mandy Moore.
So, what is the inspiration for the new record?
"Divorce and running," Adams said.
He quickly explains that running, along with music, has been something that gives him time to process things.
"I was just running today and listening to my mix and I have the same iPod that I had when I was running here and got engaged," he said.
"I was running in the gardens here and it wasn't the prettiest day, with overhanging metallic-type clouds, and I'm running up the hill and realise [up ahead] it's the bench where I got engaged and I think, 'Holy shit'. It was so intense.
"I didn't know how to process this moment. It's pristine, all walking paths and perfect, and I look down and in pink chalk someone had written in big letters, 'empathy'.
"I'm running, cooking, and I let out this really big laugh and the sun came out at that moment and the park lit up.
"Then everything made sense, and I remember thinking, 'This is why I do what I do. This is why I make records. This is why I run and this is why I get up, because of these moments'."
All this might explain why, when you listen to his new album, you can't help being hit by the searing honesty and the essential contradiction contained within it.
Here are songs of loss and pain, delivered in an upbeat style that almost seems to turn suffering into a religious experience.
It not an idea Adams rejects.
"There's really only two ways you lose things," he explained.
"You can fight and you can buy into the aberration that it belonged to you in the first place and you've been wronged, and create a ghost.
"Or, you can look at it and see it for what it was, and see how beautiful that is in the first place.
"I can say, 'I can feel this with every bone in my body … at any moment I can snap in two'. Then you can let it go and say, 'How lucky I am to be here to experience this'."
Even the pain?
"Absolutely the pain. [That] may be the most important part," he said.
"That's the part where you learn who you are, I think."
As Adams might say, schwoo, that is quite a journey and a testimony to the role music plays in his life.
This is the gift his grandmother gave him all those years ago. It's also the gift he gives, to those that come to listen.
Topics: bands-and-artists, guitar, rock, australia
