Ryan Adams had not yet played his second song at the Orpheum in Boston a couple of Fridays ago when his self-consciousness got the better of him. He sat on a chair with a guitar in his lap on a dark stage; a photographer was crouched a few feet in front of him, waiting for a shot. Adams nervously fiddled with a few chords and then, looking down at the photographer, said in a stage whisper, "Could you wait a minute? You're making me nervous." This got a laugh from the audience, which enjoyed the intimacy of the remark as well as at least the illusion of a songwriting genius who was unsure of himself. The laughter built into a round of applause. "Now that makes me nervous," Adams said, louder this time, whereupon he got another laugh. "Just pretend you don't like me," he offered, "and I'll love you forever. Just ask my girlfriend."

There are at least two Ryan Adamses you might run into. Earlier this year, when "New York, New York," the hit single from his breakthrough album Gold (Lost Highway), was getting airplay on both radio and MTV, he toured with a finely calibrated rock band called the Pink Hearts whose penchant for the late-'60s and early-'70s rock of the Stones and the Band made his songs sound much less distinctive, and much more derivative, than they are. Adams himself seemed caught up in the role of Bob Dylan recently gone electric, or Mick Jagger after Altamont; he kept his back to the audience, uttered no more than a word or two between songs, refused to play "New York, New York," and performed joylessly. In the wake of several albums with the alterna-country group Whiskeytown and a quietly masterful solo debut called Heartbreaker (Bloodshot), Adams seemed to be courting mainstream success with Gold. But once he had a hit, he treated it like a burden and enacted a farce of embattlement.

Part of getting caught up in the songs of Ryan Adams is the realization that at some point he's going to drive you nuts. His interviews are insufferable; his public persona is coy and conceited, shallow and melodramatic; and he's one of those great talents with the misfortune to realize exactly how good he is. So it's hard to say which is more annoying: when he doesn't live up to the hype, or when he does. He enjoys goading his detractors by flaunting his celebrity sweethearts, playing up the ease and the prolixity of his songwriting, and making clear his love for, among other things, such un-Americana as heavy metal, hardcore punk, and mope-rockers like the Smiths.

This is not the way serious alterna-country artists are supposed to act. Jon Langford and Steve Earle unearth old murder ballads to champion the anti-death-penalty movement. Wilco dig up lost Woody Guthrie manuscripts and collaborate with bitter folkie Billy Bragg. They don't cover Black Flag tunes, sing along with Madonna and Minor Threat records between songs, discuss the finer points of Dio albums (Adams once claimed to like them at least in part because they're the only metal band ever to use a Farfisa), or talk about forming a punk band with fellow cornflake Evan Dando. At the Orpheum, Adams prefaced a version of the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar" -- completely overhauled as a slow, mournful, and increasingly desperate plea that he played alone at the piano -- by acknowledging that though the Stones are one of his favorite bands, he might very well be making fun of them.

Part of what separates Adams from his peers is that he is determined at all costs to appear relevant to those his own age -- at 27, he is playing a kind of music that, for all the marketing savvy of the No Depression crowd, has little in the way of youth-culture cachet. Heartbreaker, with its rustic, finger-picked back-porch homilies, its precociously poignant portraits of desire, loss, and uneasy redemption, and its creaky autumnal duets with Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch, probably appealed more to a slightly older generation, one still caught up in looking for the next Dylan. But Adams is about as far from a purist as they come, and he couldn't care less. He made headlines in England earlier this year by claiming to have recorded a covers album of every song on the Strokes' Is This It? One suspects he'd trade the onus of alterna-country geniushood for just a bit of the White Stripes' hipness.

At least, that's one way of attempting to explain Gold, an album that eschewed Heartbreaker's hushed, intimate, rural-folk vibe in favor of a formidable rock assault. At the time, it raised the very real possibility that Ryan Adams had absolutely no idea what he's good at. Still, before embarking on Gold, he recorded a double album's worth of material, much of it in the style of his debut, that he intended to call The Suicide Handbook. Those songs "might have been the follow-up to Heartbreaker," he told Uncut magazine recently, "but I didn't want to be the bummer king, so I made Gold instead. Now I want to be the bummer king again, because someone's got to do it."

THE NEW RYAN ADAMS album, Demolition (Lost Highway), was a little bit infuriating even before it was released. It's an album of new material that he and his handlers have taken great pains to emphasize is not the follow-up to Gold. Intended to absolve all parties of any responsibility for the disc's commercial success, this semantic sleight-of-hand smacks of self-depreciation and vast egotism in the same breath. Inasmuch as it's an attempt to have his cake and eat it too, it was a very Ryan Adams thing to do. That the album debuted in the Billboard Top 50 and has spawned his biggest headlining tour yet and is actually quite good makes all this more than a little bit infuriating. Adams seems to believe that if he just tries hard enough, he can pick the locks of pop megastardom. That's a dubious idea at best -- if the trials and tribulations of Wilco have taught us anything, it's that even the best alterna-country band in the world will never be more than a niche-market phenomenon, no matter how good the album and how high the marketing tab.

The lesson Adams should have taken from Gold is that he does his worst work under pressure. His best songs have a fly-away, off-the-cuff informality, a rough flickering spontaneity that's hard to capture and even harder to manufacture. Producer Evan Johns has described how he watched Adams write one of Heartbreaker's better songs, "Damn Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains)," in four minutes and 45 seconds -- Johns had an assistant stand by with a stopwatch -- and then lunged for the RECORD button to catch the tune as Adams played it for the first time. That was the take used on the album, complete with the sound of the tape speeding up just in time to catch the first chord.

If Demolition isn't a proper follow-up to Gold, it isn't quite a proper follow-up to Heartbreaker, either: culled from four sessions over the course of two years, it's the journal of someone trying to figure out who he's supposed to be. It would help if listeners were issued a scorecard, a handkerchief, and a shovel: the first for keeping track of which famous girlfriend each song is about, the second to deal with the uncontrollable sobbing at least a few of its tunes will provoke, and the third for digging yourself out from the rest.

The Suicide Handbook sessions yield "Cry on Demand," a liltingly pretty but undisguisedly vicious attack aimed at former paramour Winona Ryder. A crush on Beth Orton -- he wrote for and appeared on her Daybreaker, and he's urged his fans to buy that one instead of Demolition if cash is tight, quite possibly because he thinks it's about him -- is mined for "You Will Always Be the Same," an introspective, finger-picked folk tune that would have fit perfectly on Heartbreaker. A whirlwind two-day session dubbed 48 Hours and recorded just after Gold -- it was supposedly inspired by his infatuation with supposed former infatuation junkie Alanis Morissette -- nets "Hallelujah," a breezy Bakersfield-style country-rock tune of a type curiously rare in the Adams catalogue, as well as something called "Desire" that cribs everything but the Bo Diddley beat from the U2 number of the same name. The rock-band tracks are the only songs here that truly sound like demos: his voice is shot by the time he gets to "Starting To Hurt," but the opening "Nuclear," with Dylan sideman Bucky Baxter raining weepy pedal steel over Social Distortion-strength power chords, comes closer than anything on Gold to adapting Adams's brooding melodies to modern-rock-radio standards.

And though "Nuclear" has been optimistically slated as the disc's first single, Adams's Orpheum set dispensed with any attempt at rock crossover. This was perhaps his most maddening performance yet: he pulled out his dozen or so best songs, stripped them down to bare essentials, put himself on his best behavior, and was by turns charming, boastful, and self-effacing, playful, witty, and wistful. Nearly half the tunes he played were from Heartbreaker: "Oh My Sweet Carolina," "Sweet Lil Gal (23rd & 1st)," "My Winding Wheel," "To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)," "Call Me on Your Way Back Home," the good, dark, maudlin, beautiful sad ones. But the others were perhaps even more surprising. After hearing "When the Stars Go Blue" and "The Rescue Blues" and "The Fools We Are As Men," I left not quite able to recall why I'd disliked Gold so much.

A quick refresher spin of the disc later on reminded me -- the damn thing's too long by half -- but his live performance of "Sylvia Plath" stuck with me. It's a song about longing for doomed romance -- "I wish I had a Sylvia Plath, busted tooth and smile/Cigarette ashes in her drink" -- and it's so morbid it ought to be silly, except it's so embarrassingly revealing that it's sweet: "I'm serious," he interjected at one point, as if he hadn't entirely believed the song wasn't his own joke on himself. On Gold he lets the tune's somber piano chords decay naturally, but seated at the piano at the Orpheum, whispering the words the way lovers do, he brought them to abrupt stops at the end of each phrase, so that there was a brief silence, like a heart skipping a beat, so quiet you could hear the hush of voices in the audience whispering along. And when he came back in to start the next phrase, the keys briefly booming, his voice cracked, and you knew it was for show, but like a no-good lover you can't quite shake, you decided to give him one more chance.

Issue Date: October 18 - 24, 2002