Ryan Adams wrote 'quite literally 80' songs for new fall album

Over his two-decade career, Ryan Adams has cut nearly two dozen albums as either a solo artist or with his bands Whiskeytown and the Cardinals. So you’d think he’d have the recording process down to a science. Not really.

This fall, the singer-songwriter, 41, will return with his 16th studio album, he tells EW, and he had an embarrassment of material to choose from. So how many songs did he have written? “Quite literally 80,” he says. “Probably more!”

He’s distilled those down into a dozen or so tracks for the LP, due out Nov. 4, and he credits legendary producer Don Was (Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt) for some much-needed studio guidance. “I didn’t know if I knew what I was doing,” he says. “So when you’re in a situation like that, you gotta get Gandalf—you gotta call Don Was!”

Last fall, when Adams was promoting his cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989 album, he told EW his upcoming set was inspired by the “sonic geography” of Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder.

But in the months since, new influences have crept in, including Bruce Hornsby and AC/DC. Adams zeroed in on these artists while going on long runs around his adopted hometown of Los Angeles: “When I run, I listen to [an iPod] Nano that I have,” he says. “I put all the AC/DC records on from back to front, or I’ll listen to the best of stuff from the ’80s: Springsteen, or [Nick] Hornsby, and I’ll listen to what is going on there. I was listening to AC/DC’s Fly on the Wall and that’s when I realized what I had to do for the record.”

Adams also says Bachman-Turner Overdrive and ELO helped shape his guitar sounds specifically: “I was like, ‘Wow! I understand the multicolored guitar tone moments now. You can layer stuff. I really just learned a lot.”

Lyrically, Adams admits he’s doing some soul-searching for this album. “I’m taking all the cool, big questions I’m asking on this record, then flipping it over, and then flipping it back to Side-A and you still have more questions…I’m a relatively convoluted soul creatively,” he muses. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think the challenge for me—the Everest peak, for me—is to tell this story in 11 songs, to tell this part of my life in 11 songs. How do I make a real distinct record where anybody listens to it and says, ‘That’s the truth from beginning to end.’ So it’s like exercise. It sucks in the beginning. But then you get into it.”

Ryan Adams on Anthemic New Breakup LP: 'This Record Was Not Born of Sadness'

"It doesn't matter who I was married to," Ryan Adams says, on a January afternoon in Los Angeles. "People do not get married to fucking get divorced. There is a fail in it that cannot be described. Especially when neither person would ever have wanted to cause the harm that is, unfortunately, the side dish to that emotional dark meal."

Prisoner, Adams' 16th solo record, is also his first collection of original songs since his separation from actor and musician Mandy Moore in 2015. In the tumultuous years leading up to Prisoner, Adams had dealt with the death of the grandmother who'd helped raise him (his "G-Ma"); being diagnosed with the painful and disorienting inner-ear condition known as Meniere's Disease; and, finally, his divorce. Driven by raw, anthemic rock ballads like the arena-ready "Do You Still Love Me?," the propulsive "Outbound Train" and the quietly epic, harmonica=solo-laden "Doomsday," the album is a bittersweet exploration of how it feels for the 42-year-old Adams to be on his own again.

During his eight-year marriage, Adams had worked to keep the couple's private life private. But in his music, the hyper-prolific singer-songwriter has always thrived on oversharing. Since a debut solo album called Heartbreaker in 2000, the Jacksonville, North Carolina, native has released nearly an album a year, consistently returning to themes of loneliness, romantic disappointment and the impermanence of love. A childhood marred by instability led him to emancipate himself from his parents at age 17, and Adams takes pride in the self-reliance he developed at an early age. "I wasn't overqualified, having written sad songs, to go through that in my personal life," Adams says. "I see this beautiful and tragic world, and I do my best to describe it, because it's been crushing to me since I was a kid. It seems to be how I connect."

Work on Prisoner began in 2015, as touring for Adams' self-titled 2014 album was winding down. "I needed to get out of fucking L.A. for a minute, because I didn't really want to be here waiting for somebody to take my photo or for something to get weird," he says. Adams, who had lived in New York in the early 2000s and never lost his affinity for the city, rented a place on W. 9th Street, a block away from his old apartment, and two blocks from Electric Lady Studios, where he would record Prisoner. "I didn't edit. I let myself go free in my mind," he says, noting that sessions for the album yielded more than 80 songs. Adams played most of the parts himself, with the only consistent accompanist being his best friend and longtime drummer, Johnny T.

Adams found himself reinvestigating the things he loved in the music of AC/DC, Electric Light Orchestra and Bruce Hornsby. He says he'd realized while making Ryan Adams that the sad music he'd grown up loving wasn't always slow and wasn't always hopeless, and for Prisoner he wanted to focus on songs with forward momentum. "I wanted to go even further into writing simple lines, like Eighties Bruce Springsteen," he says. Adams describes going to a place in his mind where, he says: "I could hear the radio in that backroom at G-Ma's house. I could see the sunlight coming through the window, and I could hear [Springsteen's] 'Jungleland' playing. I could feel all those elements. And it felt good to be fragile and a little crushed."

"This record," he explains, "was not born of sadness, and I was not crying. I was elated. Very stoned. And very free in those moments. I could fall asleep at 10:30 watching Hill Street Blues. I might wake up at 1 a.m. and have a riff in my head. I go into the living room and my [Fender] Jazzmaster's sitting there and it's already plugged in. I play a little bit. Smoke a bowl. Go back upstairs. Fall asleep. I'm free! I'm flying with my muse. And I'm open for business. People call me and they want talk, they need to get something off their mind, I got all the time in the world for them. It's fucking great."