From heartbreak to gold

Ryan Adams (no, it's not a misprint) is a most talented and prolific songwriter. He talks to ANDY GILL about writing straight from the heart.

In the copious credits to Elton John's forthcoming album, a select group of people is singled out for thanks - his co-writer, Bernie Taupin, the producer, Pat Leonard, the mixer, Bill Bottrell, and John's partner, David Furnish. And right at the top is the message: "Special thanks to Ryan Adams, who inspired me to do better."

It proves that, however surrounded by the stuff and nonsense of celebrity he may be, John still has a keen ear for the competition and a true fan's appreciation of talent.

The tribute is even more impressive given that Adams doesn't contribute to Elton's album nor, one imagines, to his private life. He probably doesn't have the time: since the release last autumn of his brilliant solo debut, Heartbreaker, the young songwriter has moved from Nashville to Los Angeles, recorded an equally brilliant follow-up, Gold, seen the belated release of Pneumonia, the last album by his old country-rock band Whiskeytown, and started work on a play, Sweetheart, and a novel, The Bastard Diaries of Los Angeles, both of which he plans to have finished by Christmas.

Then, next February, comes the first album by his other band, the Pink Hearts, which he compares to his heroes the Replacements: "loud, melodic and fast but not too fast".

He's probably the most prolific rock'n'roll artist working today - Pneumonia and Gold were planned as double albums, so prodigious was his output - but what really sets Adams apart is the sheer quality of his material, which appears to pour out of him with enviable ease.

"I rolled into this one the same way I rolled into Heartbreaker," he says of the new album. "Just went into the studio and began working on the songs. Most of them are pretty immediate, most of it was written that afternoon, if not an hour before we recorded it. I like to keep it fresh - that way I'm not self-analytical."

Adams' decision to leave the hard-drinking, rabble-rousing Whiskeytown had long been on the cards, but the final straw was a disastrous tour supporting former Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman John Fogerty.

"I was tremendously happy to be out of Whiskeytown," he admits. "Writing for a band, you can't be as self-evocative and forthcoming, because then it just looks sort of contrived. When I make solo records, I think I'm able to explore more, maybe able to tame the structures down more, so it's like telling a story about myself, or my reflections, and less about the force of the band.

"Because great rock'n'roll bands are about attitude and believability, you just go forward with things and let them live with that format. But a solo record is really about me trying to exhume things in myself that I wasn't aware of, probably."

He's not wrong. Like its predecessor, Gold comes straight from the heart. Back in 1998, Adams moved from his native North Carolina to New York, where he met and fell deeply in love with a woman called Amy. When she dumped him two years later, the emotional devastation inspired the songs that made up Heartbreaker, which he recorded in Nashville with a pick-up band featuring his friends Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

The ripples of that traumatic break-up still lap around Gold but are being gradually transmuted into more general concerns. On each album, one track alone is listed in capitals: the debut's self-explanatory AMY followed here by SYLVIA PLATH, an expression of Adams' yearning for an equivalent creative bohemian goddess figure.

"AMY was in caps because I was finally making a huge statement about somebody that a lot of my songs and a lot of my life had been about for a long time, and I wanted it to be very self-evident. And on this record, SYLVIA PLATH is in capitals because ... I don't know ... I'll leave the comparison open for you to decide ... "

At times, he believes, his songwriting is more confessional than he'd like, but he prefers to present the direct, unalloyed truth, rather than hide behind mystery and allusion.

"Sometimes I really do tell more than I should, to make myself uncomfortable, to make the listener maybe more uncomfortable, but just to make a point, so that we actually get somewhere because we're sharing an intimacy and a truth that you maybe don't get from a silly pop song. I'd rather write about the real things: I'd rather learn, than hear a bunch of someone's self-imposed arty crap."

The results of this desire to strip bare his emotions are understandably hard on Adams. He can't listen to Heartbreaker, and says it shocks him how intensely low he felt at the time, though he denies that he's particularly attracted to the melancholic.

"I'm a pretty upbeat, happy person, I think," he says. "But to write about things, there are places it's important that I go to, and some of those places are not as bright and happy as I might be in my normal life. But for every sad song I write, there's usually one line where I poke fun at myself."

Hence the intro to Heartbreaker, an amusing snippet of studio chat in which Adams and David Rawlings dispute the provenance of a Morrissey track, which serves to temper the ensuing tide of heartache. For all that, as one critic noted of his solo debut, "feeling so bad has seldom sounded so laceratingly good".

Adams' infallible knack for melody and his affection for classic early-70s R&B/country/blues crossover rock ensures that, himself aside, a good time is guaranteed for all.

On the new album, there are echoes of the Who, Traffic, the Eagles, the Let It Bleed-era Stones, Gram Parsons, Stax soul, and at least three tracks emulating the lollopy gait of the Band's The Weight, all wielded with an ease and freedom, in sharp contrast to the slavish appropriations of most retro-rock.

There's an equally stark difference in ambition, too, reflected in Adams' Eurocentrism and his appreciation of non-musical culture, particularly the books of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Henry Miller, which inspired his wanderlust - "I just feel like a voyeur wherever I am" - and his urge to write. Judging by his description, The Bastard Diaries of Los Angeles appears to follow the Beat principles of journalistic immediacy and imaginative transformation of everyday life.

"It's kind of a dreamscape and self-analysis, me thinking about the world on paper. The focus of the book is comparing the entire world and my entire life to things I saw on Hollywood Boulevard when I was living in a haunted hotel there. It's really interesting and cool - I mean, the way I wrote it is. It's long-form narrative prose, so it's kind of like an ongoing poem, but readable like a regular paragraphed book, like Miller or Kerouac, but not nearly as good."

We'll just have to take him at his word, but if his facility for songwriting is any indication of his literary talent, it could well outstrip his heroes' accomplishments. For the moment, my advice would be to take a leaf out of John's book and acquaint yourself with Adams. Who knows, he might inspire you to do better, too.

- INDEPENDENT

* Gold is out now.