Ryan Adams: Mood changer

After splitting from his record company and beating Meniere's disease, Ryan Adams is in a good place. Photo / Supplied

As troubadour Ryan Adams prepares to return here, Scott Kara finds him in a good frame of mind

It was all going well with Ryan Adams - alt-country rock's most prolific songwriter and moody problem child - until the Neil Finn incident came up. You know, the one about the pair appearing on BBC TV show Songwriters' Circle together and Adams refusing to sing on Finn's Fall At Your Feet, not to mention his other less-than-polite behaviour.

TimeOut had been asked not to talk about Finn by Adams' management and record company, but considering our Neil is Kiwi rock royalty, it would be remiss not to broach the subject.

And besides, the whole thing seemed to have been blown out of proportion and this was Adams' chance to tell his side of the story.

But when Finn's name was raised, the interview was cut short. Not by Adams, mind you, but by his record company representative, who had been listening in on the call.

"I can't allow you to ask that question. Sorry," they said.

To be fair to Adams, he would possibly have been open to talking about it because when TimeOut said, 'oh, okay. Oh well, thanks Ryan. Cheers man. See you later", he replied with a reasonably cheery, "Thanks. See ya."

Despite this abrupt end to our call, it is clear Adams is in a good place after a few years on hiatus due to an inner ear condition known as Meniere's disease that affects hearing and balance.

And despite his famously fiery and temperamental nature, you have to give the gifted songwriter a break. He released 10 albums (as Ryan Adams or with his band the Cardinals) in eight years during the 2000s, so if any one deserves some time off it's Adams.

As early as 2007, when he released Easy Tiger, he admits he had already started to "wear out" and was growing increasingly frustrated at the grip his old record company, Lost Highway, had over him.

By the time he and the band had finished 2008's Cardinology, Adams' 10th album, and fourth and last with the Cardinals and Lost Highway, he was "as sick as I've ever been in my life".

"It was becoming really, really difficult for me to hear, as well as just to stand up straight because of the vertigo and the nausea, all the stuff that comes along with it," he says on the phone from St Louis, Missouri, where he is on tour for his latest album Ashes & Fire.

"I actually went on tour doing the best I could but I could barely hear at all. It was a lot of stress, and as soon as we were done, as soon as the obligations [to his record company] had been taken care of I needed to get away and get off the road.

"I needed to get specialist help for this shit that I was dealing with. It was a big challenge in my life."

Finding professional help, regular acupuncture sessions, and living a healthy lifestyle (a far cry from his alcohol and drug-fuelled days of the early 2000s) are keeping his condition in check.

But best of all, the break did him good.

He set up his own label, enabling him to record the music and release the albums that he wants to, and last year he released 13th album Ashes & Fire.

"I definitely felt a lot more relaxed, that's for sure, and it was nice to make a record for my own label," he says.

It's mostly a beautifully lush and reflective album though Chains of Love rarks it up a little more and sounds like the Verve meets Echo and the Bunnymen's Cutter. But mainly it's just Adams, his guitar, and his voice, which is able to stretch out more because he's not competing with a big rowdy rock band like the Cardinals.

"Brad, the drummer of the Cardinals, was really a very loud drummer. He is a very, very solid drummer, but just a really, really loud drummer," he remembers with a laugh.

"It [Ashes & Fire] is about me revealing," he says of the album, and songs like the loyal, heartfelt pleas of Come Home (with Norah Jones) and the toe-tapping twang of the title track.

Also in the last few years he put out two albums of unreleased songs - the metal-influenced Orion and III/IV with the Cardinals - on Pax AM. It was a cleansing of sorts for Adams.

"III/IV is actually the record that the band were really working on when we made Easy Tiger but the label didn't want a rock record. But we were just doing the songs we were writing and happy about. So they showed what the records would have really been like," he says.

Meanwhile, Orion was a result of his lifelong love of heavy metal, particularly Canadian story-telling heavies Voivod.

"I don't love all metal, and I don't think anybody does, but what I do love about it is, I guess I like the thrill of the riffs, and I like the way they [the riffs] make me feel in real time. I think metal can be as organic as any blues music, or pop music, and there is just a different sort of majestic property to metal and a certain fantasy element that just isn't in any other kind of music."

And while he may not play any heavy metal when he tours here in March for the third time, having last played the Powerstation in 2009, he's looking forward to visiting again.

"I can't wait to get back and maybe check out some more skate parks."

LOWDOWN

Who: Ryan Adams
Where and when: Regent Theatre, Dunedin, March 6; The Civic, Auckland, March 8
Latest album: Ashes & Fire, out now
Also listen to: Heartbreaker (2000); Jacksonville City Nights (2005); Cardinology (2008); III/IV (2010)

-TimeOut