Ryan Adams expertly mixed the sad and silly for an intimate night at the State Theatre
There was a telling moment about halfway through Ryan Adams’ two-and-a-half-hour set Tuesday night at the State Theatre that might have been easy to miss unless you were giving Adams your full, undivided attention. While tuning what seemed to be a pair of persistently untunable guitars (“This has never happened to me before,” he joked), Adams finished up one of his many hilarious anecdotes with a quick “He used to be a dick, now he’s just crazy,” delivered in a fast and brittle sing-song voice.
It has to be hard for Adams at this stage in his career. Once known as the thinking man’s rock ’n’ roll bad boy—a reputation that included an infamously rocky and belligerent Minneapolis performance in 2003—Adams has now sobered up, married a former bubblegum pop star (Mandy Moore, who unfortunately wasn’t in attendance to provide a few harmonies), and just this year put out Ashes & Fire, which is one of the most mellow and introspective albums of his 13-album career.
No musician wants to be accused of rounding off his or her edges, and while some fans have suggested just as much with this most recent album, Adams was able to find a perfect push and pull between his troubled past and his newfound clarity throughout the night, adeptly peppering in laugh-out-loud stories and goofy non sequiturs from a bygone era among songs from his expansive catalogue of delicate, emotional, and often sad music. If hearing Adams talk about eating nachos while on mushrooms at an arcade or wearing white Ray-Bans and a wrist cast during an acoustic festival that also included Paula Cole sounds like it would come into conflict with an exceedingly tender one-man acoustic show, it didn’t. The stories instead lent the entire evening an air of self-conscious nakedness that only heightened the raw, emotional impact of Adams’ music.
Adams got right into it with the night’s first song, Heartbreaker’s “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” which caused a hush among an already quiet crowd. Adams then segued into the title track of his latest album, sending a clear message that this was going to be an evening largely dedicated to quieter fare, although the audience did get a few up-tempo numbers, such as “16 Days,” a nice throwback to his Whiskeytown days.
While it was a treat to hear live versions of new songs like “Invisible Riverside” and the instant classic “Lucky Now,” the real marvels came when Adams took to his stand-up piano and plunked out stirring versions of Gold’s “Sylvia Plath” and Love Is Hell’s “My Blue Manhattan,” each of which swelled and ached with an insurmountable amount of encroaching melancholy and threadbare earnestness.
At times the night felt a little too stop and start, and while Adam’s improvised song about time portals and Sarah Connor from The Terminator movies was a welcome bit of levity, we probably could have done without five minutes of him leisurely thanking his stage and sound people. Still, this is a minor complaint, especially when Adams delivered moments as beautiful as “Come Pick Me Up,” which finished the night before the singer returned with Ratt and Bob Mould covers for his encore performance.
It’d be fair to criticize and say Adams could have tightened up his show with fewer chatty moments, but it’s also just as easy to argue that his conversational approach only heightened his song’s dramatic impact, essentially turning the concert in a playful and sneakily reflective trip through the mind of a man just now figuring out the details of his life.
