Ryan Adams talks to Brian Boyd about record company woes, his new albums, The Smiths and the songs that saved his life . . .
Like a character from a J.D. Salinger novel, Ryan Adams saunters into a hotel room, all skin and bones and as louche as you please. With ruffled hair, thrift shop attire and sleepy looking eyes, it's difficult to recognise him as one of this generation's most prolific and most talented musical artists. He's clutching a 20-pack carton of American Spirit cigarettes to his chest while trying to arrange a mound of music magazines clustered around his small feet. "Giving up cigarettes is easy," he smiles. "I've done it lots of times. I'm on these now [holds us pack of "American Spirit" as if to an imaginary camera], they're great, they don't have any pesticides or chemicals in them and part of the money you pay for them goes to native American charities."
Still only 28, the North Carolina native has already had two successful careers in the music industry, first with the Americana flavoured Whiskeytown and then as a solo artist - his Heartbreaker (2000) and Gold (2001) albums doing for alt-country rock what Nirvana did for grunge. For the past few years, the temperamental and volatile Adams has been compared, almost on a daily basis, to Gram Parsons and Bob Dylan. His work is astonishingly good, and being so prolific (he can turn around albums within a week), you would think he was a record company's dream - a big-selling artist with lots of product to push.
Not so. Despite his elevated status, he was hauled in by his company a few months ago and told his new album wasn't good enough. What was supposed to be the follow up to Gold, called Love Is Hell, was deemed "too dark and too gloomy for public release". Adams, who had called Love Is Hell "the work of my life" and had said it sounded like a mix of Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen, was distraught.
"Love Is Hell, is something I totally believe in. People close to me, who have heard it, it has affected them in very serious ways, not just in a 'this is nice, this is big, and it rocks' kind of way.
"It's a completely unstylised and an absolutely reckless album. It was the place where I was the most myself and freest. It kind of had - has - the potential to be a doomy record that can befriend people who are in a doomy place. And that wasn't a career move that my label felt like I needed to make at that time . . . they [the label] just didn't know what to do with it. I was hearing terms like 'too depressing' and also 'it's not your best work' and stuff like that."
When the label, Lost Highway, told him they weren't going to release it, Adams refused to speak to them for months. "Angry isn't the word. I decided the best thing to do was to go back into the studio and pay for sessions myself, sessions which would have nothing to do with them."
Those sessions led to the new album, Rock 'n' Roll - his first new studio album since 2001. A compromise, of sorts, was reached with the Love Is Hell album. On the same day this week that Rock 'n' Roll hit the shops, half of Love Is Hell was also released in EP form (six songs), with the other half due out in December.
The drama surrounding the album that never was informed the sessions for Rock 'n' Roll which is, as he says, "a straight-up rock record". "I had just made one sort of album and I'm always on about doing something else, something I hadn't done before, because, as people know, I do a lot of different types of stuff. So I made this for the reason that I hadn't done anything like this before."
Featuring contributions by members of Green Day and ex-members of the Smashing Pumpkins, Rock 'n' Roll will wrong-foot his traditional fan base - there's not a twang to be heard. Think The Strokes, early U2, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Replacements, Sonic Youth and The Psychedelic Furs.
Despite the reference points, there is one toweringly dominant musical influence on the album: The Smiths.
"You know, I like to think of myself as pretty much a guy's guy but there's something about The Smiths that reduces me to a tearful six-year-old girl when I hear their music. Oh my god, Morrissey as a lyricist and Johnny Marr as a guitarist - it's just everything. I grew up in North Carolina and when I first heard Hatful Of Hollow I just couldn't believe it. I didn't even know where England was, let alone Manchester. I knew something about Oliver Twist but that was about it. And being in school, it was just so perfect - this sentimental loner type of music, I know it's a cliché about the band, but it worked for me. I had no idea at all about the many local references in their songs but they just seemed to fill in the blanks for me when I was growing up.
"So this album is my homage to them and as you so correctly spotted there's a bit on my song Anybody Wanna Take Me Home where I re-create one of their studio effects as a tribute. It's that false fade-out/fade-in thing - they did it on That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore, just at the end of the reverse slide guitar part and then again on Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others where Johnny Marr delays the reverb. And I do it on my song because of them."
When Adams first played a show in Manchester, he spent days in the city trawling the second-hand record shops picking up every conceivable Smiths issue available.
"I've got everything they've ever done on vinyl, all the 12-inches, all the German pressings of their records, all the singles where the wrong b-side was put on and I even have [pauses dramatically] a copy of the Troy Tate sessions [extremely rare Smiths first album sessions which were never released - the holy grail for Smiths fans]. And I've a massive Smiths bootleg collections as well. Morrissey is really a profound influence on my songwriting.
"I was really upset once when I was working with some other musician, which is now in the past, for Geoff Travis's Rough Trade label [the man who signed The Smiths] and I thought it would be a great chance to meet Geoff and get all the stories but something, eh, sort of happened and eh, it just didn't work out - to my regret. I am, though, one step away from Johnny Marr. We have a friend in common. I sort of put the message out that I wanted to work with John Porter [Smiths producer] and through our mutual friend, Johnny Marr set it up for me.
"Oh, have you read Songs That Saved Your Life [Simon Goddard's brilliant book which tells the story behind each and every Smiths song]? How did you read it? Straight through or by picking out songs? I still can't decide what way to approach it."
Adams is at pains to point out that the new album is by no means a work of plagiarism or overly derivative of The Smiths's oeuvre.
"Ok, it's a guitar-rock record and obviously my love of The Smiths shines through but really what's behind all this is the hassle of Love Is Hell. When I went in to record this, there were all these record company problems and I just thought I was going to, as a musician, exhume everything I own musically and put it on this record. I was totally letting go and releasing control in that respect.
"The real clue to this album is that it explains me by my relationship to music. It's actually a concept album about a concept, if you know what I mean."
No, not really.
"Ok, let's try this: it's me reflecting on who I am by the records I own. Now can we go back to talking about The Smiths . . ."
Rock 'n' Roll and the Love Is Hell EP are on Lost Highway. Ryan Adams plays The Olympia, Dublin, on November 16th