Redemption Songs

As a teenager, Ryan Adams dropped some acid and smoked some weed. And even though he drank Mad Dog 20/20 once in a while, he wasn't too impressed with the effects of alcohol. "I always thought it made people stupid," he says. "People who were drunk seemed hypernostalgic." But just shy of his twentieth birthday, Adams was playing a gig with his first band, the Patty Duke Syndrome, at the Fallout Shelter in Raleigh, North Carolina. After the first song, the audience clapped. "I was paralyzed with some kind of irrational fear, but I couldn't place what that fear was," Adams says. "I didn't understand what I was going through." He spotted an open bottle of Rolling Rock at the side of the stage. "I remember thinking, 'I should probably have some of that. Maybe it will calm me down.'"

Later, he formed a band called Whiskeytown ("You can imagine what that was like") and kicked off a decade-long addiction to drugs and alcohol that would help him write an endless stream of songs, inure him to stage fright, alienate him from friends and family, and nearly kill him. "I was just looking for a way to feel transcendental when I wrote," says Adams, who has been sober since May 7th, 2006. "I'd wake up, work, work, work, go for a drink or two, and then be exhausted. So I would have drugs to keep my physical being going in order to never have to stop working in the night." In 2005 alone, Adams released three albums, Jacksonville City Nights, 29 and Cold Roses.

"My life had no other purpose," he says. "I was doing nothing but working and getting high. I lost all my connections to everyone and everything." Toward the end, his snort of choice became speedballs, an intense combination of coke and heroin -- and he hit rock-bottom. Adams quit cold turkey, with the assistance of his current girlfriend, Jessica Joffe, who had earlier discovered a path to sobriety.

"To think about falling off a bicycle and smashing your nuts on that bar or whatever the most horrible sports-accident thing you can think of: That doesn't cover what it would be like for me to imagine drinking or doing drugs again," he says, taking a puff off his American Spirit cigarette in S.I.R. studios in Manhattan, where he and his band, the Cardinals, are rehearsing for a string of dates behind his new disc, Easy Tiger. He looks younger than thirty-two, and without the greasy flop of hair that used to hide his face, he resembles his own description of himself as a fifteen-year-old growing up in Jacksonville, North Carolina. On this hot spring day, he's wearing a Slayer T-shirt, sliding a skateboard under his feet and talking about collecting comic books. In fact, the Cardinals are named after his high school football team.