Ryan Adams is taking it easy.
After seven years of ricocheting between different genres as a solo artist (’70s funk on Gold, ’80s punk on Rock N Roll, mellow folk on Love is Hell), Adams returns to his Whiskeytown roots on Easy Tiger (June 26, Lost Highway): country-flavored midlife angst. The result is his most consistent album-in terms of both style and content-to date.
The infamously prolific singer-songwriter holds back on this outing, delivering 13 odes to faded glory that clock in at about 42 minutes. This is Adams’ shortest album, but the emotional weight of the songs outlives their three-minute boundaries.
Easy Tiger reminds us that Adams is a wordsmith first and foremost: He co-wrote every song here. These songs, with a few exceptions, including the rollicking “Halloweenhead,” lack the hooks of some of his previous tunes, but the raw honesty of his words give the meandering melodies devastating resonance as they unspool themselves.
Loneliness has long been a recurring theme in the Adams songbook, but on Easy Tiger he draws the focus in tighter, fixating on the insecurities and sadness that seep in with the onset of middle age and in the aftermath of a temperamental love affair.
The album’s lead singe, “Two,” which features guest vocals from the ever-moody Sheryl Crow, appropriately sets the tone for this introspective chapter of Adams’ career. He sings simply, “It takes two when it used to take only one.” This album details Adams’ many attempts, and failures, at maintaining a relationship that might lift him from the squalor of his solitude.
Adams’ confessional tone together with the unobtrusive, largely acoustic accompaniment, lend Easy Tiger an intimate tone that has been scarce on Adams’ albums since his solo debut, Heartbreaker.
Listening to “Off Broadway,” an elegy to the relationships that fade away as sand sifts through the hourglass, it is easy to imagine Adams sitting in a room lit only by the dim embers from a cigarette, his voice calling wistfully into the darkness.
Adams’ vocal enthusiasm is his secret weapon. In every song he sings, he adopts a different vocal style to color his composition as he sees fit. The unifying factor is the energy he injects into every performance.
He may not have operatic chops, but his elastic vocals can soar with passion or simmer until reaching a brooding boiling point. His moody growl on the album’s epic centerpiece, “The Sun Also Sets,” will send chills up your spine. His crooning in the back porch jam session “Pearls on a String” is reminiscent of alt-country mainstays Lyle Lovett and Dwight Yokam.
This album blossoms as it progresses, so it is best when listened to as a whole, giving the soul-bearing songs a chance to borough their way into the annals of your mind. The listener should beware, though, because this album is saturated with sadness. It isn’t easy listening to as an accompaniment to a beach romp.
Easy Tiger splits loneliness, rejection and pain wide open, and invites the listener to revel in the beauty of an emotional breakdown. In one of the songs collected here, Adams laments that “tears of gold precede the rapture . tears of gold . heal the soul.” Adams embraces the beautiful sadness to find healing before moving on for his next attempt at happiness.
No one does heartbreak as well, or as often, as Ryan Adams. Easy Tiger, which follows him on a journey through his bruised psyche, is his most assured effort to date, offering a portrait of the human being behind the maverick persona he has inhabited in recent years.
