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You recently said that you have two new rules. One is not to analyse what you write, and the
other is not to read your own press. What are your feelings about sitting down with journalists to
discuss yourself and the album?
"Well, it's not really a feeling as much as it is just trying to make sure that I'm very clear,
and if somebody asks me a question just to be as dead-on, directly honest, as I can. If I feel like
being facetious, then be facetious. It's... I don't know... It's just what it is, I guess. I don't
have a choice!"
As always, you've been extremely prolific in the last couple of years. How important is it for
you and your own personal sanity to keep churning out songs?
"One doesn't necessitate the other. I really enjoy writing songs, and I write tons of songs.
What ends up from that is that I make lots of recordings and end up making lots of records or at
least records quicker, so I tour more. It is sort of habitual in a way, but it's not habitual
because of anything or in lieu of anything. It's kind of just something I dig. It makes sense to
me. I get inspired a lot. I try to keep myself in an inspired area, not only just because I find it
natural to be inspired by other artists or art or playing rock'n'roll or just the sound of guitar.
It makes sense to me to do it. I really like the way it makes me feel, and it tucks away nicely the
things that are going on with me. It's a trip. It's kind of like riding a skateboard. Maybe it's
just that you like to get on the board and ride, and I like to get on the guitar and go. I dig it.
I like getting better at explaining myself."
Does that have to do with the clarity that you just mentioned, being able to project your
feelings and emotions as directly as possible?
"It's a freeing thing sometimes, and sometimes it's actually a clarifying thing. Sometimes it's
all mad, and I've got to express myself. It morphs and changes. It's so multi-dimensional that it's
really impossible to describe the process. I imagine that just playing guitar is like that. I don't
know how to really describe it, besides maybe it's just a place I dig going a lot. It's just one of
my favourite spots."
Also, you recently remarked: "I don't really live anywhere; I'm just sort of transient right
now." To what extent do your surroundings and the cities you live in take an effect on your
songwriting?
"I described it this morning perfectly. No matter what town I'm in, I can probably get
breakfast, and it's going to have eggs. Everything else about it is going to be a little bit
different. No matter what city or country you're in, you can always get stock eggs for breakfast. I
already come loaded with ideas anyway, so maybe I might just take in fractions of something like...
It's a shame they had me booked all today [doing promotion - Ed.], because yesterday all I did was
sleep. It was my first day off in like a month and a week or longer, in actuality more like six
months, because I've been in the studio, and it's been non-stop. I went to the Anne Frank museum. I
read Jopie's book ['Jopie' was the alias Anne Frank gave to her best friend Jacqueline van Maarsen -
Ed.], Anne's best friend in the book. She wrote a book, and at the end of the museum you could buy
books. I had no idea Jopie even wrote a book, so I read that - half of it last night and half of it
this morning in the bath, before I started all of this shit at two. That was my only time to get up.
But whatever... Sometimes just maybe the thrill of getting a day off or being in a new place. You
feel it in your gut, and then it's just going to become whatever it is. I usually comment on other
places when I'm in a place. Sometimes I comment directly on where I've been, and then other times I
tend to meander. More lately, I am digging writing about being over here [Europe - Ed.]. I've been
spending more time here than in the States, and I actually care to be here, to work out of Europe as
a musician more than in the States, because I don't really care for it over there at all much. I
love my cities, my sister cities LA and New York. I love where I'm from in the South. I don't mind
being around the United States, but I don't really care to be there. I'd much rather be here.
There's more history, the people seem to be a lot more fun, conversations are interesting. No one
watches the fucking television here. People talk about music, and they want to take walks. Romantic
culture exists so heavily and so hard over here. Amsterdam, London... You could be in Ireland. I
find it heavily, heavily sedated in romance in Sweden and in Norway. In Scandinavia in general I
find it to be just unbelievable. My attractions to be here and to write here and to work out of here
are heavier. In a couple of days I'm going to be in Stockholm, and I'm going to record with Michael
Blair, the guy that played drums on 'Rain Dogs' [Tom Waits - Ed.]. He's going to record me in front
of the microphone, and Beth [Orton - Ed.] is coming down, so Beth and I will duet. We're going to
make a whole record in two nights. It's just going to be my songs, and she's going to be there for
other stuff, and it's going to be really cool!"
You seem to take a keen interest in poets and painters. Do you have any other literary
aspirations besides writing songs?
"Have always and am working on it! I've been working on a play called 'Sweetheart'. That's set
in New York in a small apartment. It's about this relationship between this married couple, a
Brooklynite and someone from the South, and their mother. You never see her face. It's all written
for play, but I'm going to try to make it into a short story, about 120-130 pages long. Setting
first, then have it edited into play format by someone who's better, although they said that I could
do it, and then they could fix it up. So I might do it one way or the other. I've already got tons
of notes and tons of it written. It just has to be edited by myself, correctly. Then I've been
keeping this long, abated process of writing about afternoons that I've been having and things I've
seen, with the exclusion of people I know. It's not about: 'I talked to this person on the phone.'
Nothing's ever about rock'n'roll, unless I mention an album I'm listening to. It's about daydreams I
have, dreams I have, places I wander through, the colour of the city, things like this... It started
out as this idea about someone who'd been in New York for three years, which I had been. A converted
New Yorker going to LA for the first time... That was the original intent of the book. So those two
are the ones on the way, and I'm talking to a publishing agent and a couple of different publishers.
The way it's going to work for me is that I'm just going to have to find one that gives me a
deadline, and then they'll get the finished product. I work better under pressure."
You're a big fan of The White Stripes, and you also played a cover of The Stooges' 'I Wanna Be
Your Dog' at your Amsterdam show recently. Is this the kind of stuff we can expect to hear on the
Pink Hearts [one of Adams' projects - Ed.] album?
"No. Pink Hearts kinds of sounds like Hüsker Dü and The Replacements and The Stones. It's like
really, really funny - not total joke songs, but songs where we're really just having a great time.
You can hear the humour, and it was a really laid-back thing. It was very much what I needed to be
involved in in Tennessee, because I'd just been through some heavy record-making. It's done. It's
finished, but I've already done two since that are really great. One is what was being lauded as the
demos for 'Gold'. It's called 'The Suicide Handbook', and it's being put together and edited into
one record format. Pink Hearts will also be one, and then there's going to be this one that's just
me and the acoustic guitar that I've done. Then a record I made with Ethan Johns [Adams' friend,
producer, and multi-instrumentalist - Ed.] in three days, right after 'Gold'... It was two weeks
after the completion of 'Gold', and I went to see Alanis Morissette perform at the El Rey Theater
[in Los Angeles - Ed.]. I called Ethan the next night and said: 'Man, I have another record.' These
were songs I'd just been working on, because I'd just done another acoustic tour, and we recorded a
record called '48 Hours'. It was actually 48 hours on the floor, where we didn't really leave,
except for a seven-hour period. Then we did a really, really quick mix, and it's a record. What my
label's going to do is they're going to affiliate with Bloodshot [Bloodshot released Adams' last
album 'Heartbreaker' - Ed.] if Bloodshot's interested. My next record after 'Gold', the one that we
push, will be me with this new band, the guys you saw in Amsterdam. It'll be in the studio with
those guys, so that I can write in that format, and in between that we're going to something called
'The Back Catalog Series 1-5'. We're going to release the record I made before 'Heartbreaker'
called 'Destroyer', '48 Hours', the record I made directly after 'Gold', 'The Suicide Handbook',
and the record I'm going to make in Stockholm in a couple of days."
With 'Heartbreaker', 'Pneumonia', and 'Gold' all coming out in rapid succession, do you ever
worry about being over-exposed, or is just getting the music out of your system more important to
you?
"Well, the way that we put this stuff out is that we put it out there, and fans can buy it if
they want it. We don't push it. We do a couple of ads for it, and I might do a very seasonal amount
of press for it, but it won't be: Here they all come out, and I'm going to play them on the road.
What will be interesting to see the next time I come around to play shows - I'm already playing
two-and-a-half- to three-hour shows - is that now these fans will have access to a million different
of my songs, which I've already been working on. Then I'll be pursuing something new. It's a good
idea. Another cool idea we had for a little while is just to sell them only at shows and sell them
only through Bloodshot Records, so that they had to be pursued. Then let them leak into record
stores as time went by... We might actually just do a big press release thing, saying that four
records have come out - well, I guess I just missed the Pink Hearts record too, so that's five -
within one month of each other or all together as part one through five. You get basically what I
would call my back catalogue, which it really is. There was just no label for it at the time. I'm
very interested in that, not to mention that there's a plethora of Whiskeytown stuff that was never
released. I'd rather let that lie where it is for a long time, because I don't really care to even
doing remixing or listening through it. I'm still writing; I'm still working forward."
Does that seem too much of a step backward for you, instead of looking ahead?
"Yeah. Somebody else can go and do that. Maybe Caitlin [Cary, Whiskeytown member - Ed.] or Mike
Daly [Whiskeytown member - Ed.] could go look through that stuff and assemble that stuff."
Were you happy with the way 'Pneumonia' finally came out?
"Well, I was actually the one that went and saved it and released it. I went to Ethan, and we
decided to put out the original version of what the record was. The one that is so lauded is the
original that people heard online, but that was not our version, it was the record label's. Our
label at the time, the Geffen people, took together a bunch of different clips from different
sessions that were not supposed to be a part of it and stuck them together. I think that was really
a kind of crap thing, because 'Pneumonia', all its glory and beauty, was really what we did in that
church [Dreamland Studios in upstate New York - Ed.] with Ethan. Anybody that thinks any
differently... especially people in our hometown go: 'The original's better!' I just look at them,
and I go: 'Well, you'd think I'd fucking know what the original was, considering I was the guy that
wrote the fucking songs!'"
Have you been able to write while on the road over here in the past few weeks?
"I have. I've written four songs with the band and a couple on my own. I wrote one that I
recorded with Beth Orton in the studio that she's going to put on her record, I think. It was a
song that I wrote that she kind of tweaked a little bit, and it's just me on acoustic guitar and her
singing. She and I covered the song 'Brown Sugar' by The Stones and turned it into this lauded sort
of ballad. Then I've been writing these really heinous Zeppelin-esque, scary Muddy Waters blues
songs, because I've been listening to the Chess box set almost exclusively. It's crept into our
music. I'm also doing this other thing called 'free writing', where, while walking to the piano
right after the encore, I'll sit down and just start playing notes and let a song come out of me
unconsciously. I know I'll have a lot on my mind, and it'll turn into one, a beautiful piece of
music that I'll already have a little bit of poetry for. Then it's sort of sticking together, and
then I start letting it happen. I wrote a song about Huckleberry Finn [Mark Twain character - Ed.]
being a pervert, which is really interesting, which is called 'Madeleine'. I really liked it. It's
not really about him being a pervert, but it's about Huck Finn discovering all of these women on
this riverboat and falling for the captain's daughter. The other two songs that we've been playing
that I wrote are called 'The Shakin' Blues' and 'The C'mon Darkness Blues'. Both of them are these
really, really intense twisted Elvis, twisted Howlin' Wolf... lit on fire, scary Elvis stuff. I've
just been melding all this stuff into very sexual, very gospel-oriented music. I'm really trying to
absolve myself in blues and gospel right now."
So you've been busy testifying then?
"Yeah! I think it would be great if half of my next record is complete, utter dark testifying;
the other half is utter flowery, dripping romance. Complete optimism. And complete pessimism. A
'Sticky Fingers' of my own. I'm ready for a twelve-song motherfucker of an album that no one can
ever touch, ever. Every last note, every last song, you can't touch. And I've got the right band
for it. Now it's just time to get in the kitchen and turn the gas on."
http://www.kindamuzik.net/interview/ryan-adams/ryan-adams/881/
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