“It was slow, adult shit,” said Ryan Adams of the album’s worth of recordings he tossed out before producing his new self-titled effort, his 14th full-length since 2000. “I’m just over that.”
For someone who’s best known for earnest alt-country—first with Whiskeytown and then as a solo artist—the quote could be taken as a bold proclamation of a directional shift. But it’s a mistake to read it without his deadpan grin attached. The North Carolina native is a master of deflating his own self-importance: Adams frequently seasons his shows with free-associative banter and musical digressions. His set at last summer’s Newport Folk Festival included a pitch-perfect Danzig cover and an off-the-cuff Michael McDonald impression.
Offstage, he’s no less hyperactive. Adams pumps out endless nonalbum tracks and side projects in idioms ranging from metal to his standard folk-rock mode. Since the self-titled LP’s September release, his Pax Am label has issued an 11-song power-pop EP (1984) and several new seven-inch singles.
Adams does have a point, though: The new album brings shimmery guitars, anthemic choruses and new-wave touches, striking a big-stage rock note that his previous record, Ashes & Fire, avoided. In 2011, he visited Carnegie Hall to play a solo acoustic show behind that LP, a tender, soft-strummed contemplation on recovery and happiness. The booking was Adams’s first cautious return to a city that he left for L.A. in late 2008, amid label troubles and ailing from Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear disorder that made live performance difficult. The show was a hater-quieting triumph.
Adams will start his NYC run the same way, with two acoustic Carnegie gigs, before putting the adult shit aside for a true return at Hammerstein Ballroom, his first time playing with a band under New York’s bright lights since his departure.—Andrew Frisicano