Ryan Adams

Mixing a singer/songwriter’s raw emotional intensity with the defiant swagger of a garage rocker, Ryan Adams stands among the rare figures who carried alt-country into broad commercial reach while remaining the figure most determined to escape any single stylistic label, shifting restlessly from one sound to the next in pursuit of his own instincts. Once Whiskeytown dissolved, he moved swiftly into a busy solo phase, issuing a steady run of albums that earned critical honors. Equally active as a collaborator and producer, he has partnered with a wide range of performers such as Willie Nelson, Fall Out Boy, Cowboy Junkies, Jenny Lewis, and Toots & the Maytals.

Adams entered the world in Jacksonville, North Carolina, during 1974. Although country formed a central part of his household listening during childhood—he has named Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Johnny Cash among his early favorites—he gravitated toward punk rock in his early teens and picked up electric guitar. He began composing songs at fifteen and, a year later, started the band Patty Duke Syndrome; Adams once described PDS as “an arty noise punk band,” frequently pointing to Hüsker Dü as a primary touchstone. The group built a local audience in Jacksonville, and at nineteen Adams and his bandmates headed to Raleigh seeking wider exposure. Before long, however, he sought a more melodic outlet that could accommodate his country and pop leanings.

In 1994 he departed Patty Duke Syndrome to start Whiskeytown alongside guitarist Phil Wandscher and violinist Caitlin Cary. Bassist Steve Grothman and drummer Eric “Skillet” Gilmore rounded out the original roster; the band’s name derived from regional slang for intoxication. Their debut, Faithless Street, appeared on the independent Mood Food label and drew widespread praise, with several writers suggesting Whiskeytown might achieve for the alt-country or No Depression movement what Nirvana had done for grunge. By the time the group signed with the Geffen-affiliated Outpost Records, though, the lineup had already begun to fracture. When Stranger’s Almanac, the band’s Outpost debut, was prepared for release in summer 1997, only Adams and Wandscher remained as official members.

Cary soon rejoined, yet Wandscher departed shortly afterward, and Whiskeytown maintained a revolving-door membership through the next two years, its concerts growing increasingly unpredictable—strong sets sometimes giving way to loud, confrontational failures. Despite the quality of Stranger’s Almanac, the band never met the commercial hopes others had projected. In 1999 the remaining core—Adams, Cary, and session players—completed Pneumonia, their third album, but a merger between PolyGram and Universal led to Outpost’s dissolution; the record was shelved, and Whiskeytown soon disbanded without fanfare.

After the split, Adams quickly established an independent path, touring acoustically before entering a Nashville studio with songwriters Gillian Welch and David Rawlings to record Heartbreaker, issued by Bloodshot Records in 2000. The album earned strong reviews, solid sales, and public support from Elton John, prompting Universal’s new Americana imprint, Lost Highway Records, to sign him. Lost Highway issued the long-delayed Pneumonia in early 2001 and, later that year, released Gold, which leaned more toward classic pop and rock of the 1970s than toward country. Following the September 11 attacks, the opening track “New York, New York” was widely adopted by radio as a symbol of resilience—though it actually addressed a failed romance—and Adams again found himself positioned as “the next big thing.”

Ever prolific, he amassed material for four albums within roughly a year after Gold. Selecting thirteen songs from sixty, he issued Demolition in 2002 while beginning work on the proper follow-up. The concept album Rock n Roll appeared in 2003 alongside the double-EP set Love Is Hell. Extensive touring sustained his momentum through the following year as he continued writing and remained a frequent subject in music coverage. May 2005 brought the first of three Lost Highway releases, the reflective double album Cold Roses; Jacksonville City Nights, a more traditional honky-tonk collection, arrived in September, and 29 followed in late December. During the gap before his next studio effort, Adams uploaded numerous tracks—including several hip-hop numbers—to his website, yet listeners encountered more conventional fare on 2007’s Easy Tiger and 2008’s Cardinology, recorded with the Cardinals.

He disbanded the Cardinals in 2009, ushering in an uncommon stretch of relative silence. Activity resumed gradually in 2010 with the vinyl-only heavy-metal project Orion and the double album III/IV, drawn from earlier Cardinals sessions around Easy Tiger, released that November. For his thirteenth solo record, Ashes and Fire, Adams enlisted Norah Jones, Benmont Tench of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, and veteran producer Glyn Johns, known for the Who’s Who’s Next.

After Ashes and Fire, an inner-ear condition forced a temporary pause and forced cancellation of several concerts. Once hypnotherapy resolved the issue, Adams resumed writing. While developing new material at his L.A. Pax-Am studio with guitarist and producer Mike Viola, he also produced other artists, overseeing Fall Out Boy’s hardcore-punk EP Pax-Am Days in 2013 and Jenny Lewis’s 2014 album The Voyager. In fall 2014 he presented his own takes on those energies: the 7-inch EP 1984, which deliberately recalled the fast, loud punk-pop of Hüsker Dü and the Replacements, followed by the polished Ryan Adams, his first release for Blue Note. The album entered the Billboard 200 at number four, his highest position to date. He quickly issued the double live set Live at Carnegie Hall in April 2015.

That recording was soon overshadowed by Adams’s decision to reinterpret Taylor Swift’s 2014 album 1989 in its entirety, framing it as a melancholic-rock counterpart to Love Is Hell. The resulting 1989 appeared in September 2015 and received a physical edition the next month. He remained largely out of view through 2016, resurfacing late in the year to announce Prisoner. Preceded by the singles “Do You Still Love Me?” and “To Be Without You,” the album arrived in February 2017. In February 2018 he released the Valentine’s Day single “Baby, I Love You.” After another period of relative quiet, he scheduled three new albums for 2019, beginning with Big Colors in April.

On February 13, 2019, the New York Times published allegations of sexual misconduct against Adams; the article included accounts from several women, among them his former wife, Mandy Moore. Blue Note subsequently canceled Big Colors, and Adams withdrew from public view. He reappeared in December 2020 with Wednesdays, issued on his own Pax Am label.