A warm and understated Adams sharpens his focus
SOMERVILLE — Ryan Adams closed a two-hour-plus set last night with one hand raised to the stage lights, the other tucked into his lap. “Can I get a Diet Coke?” he asked politely. “I promise I won’t stay up all night.”
This is what passes for a tantrum in Adams’s world these days: a disjointed drawl and a dry laugh, ghosts of the irascibility that once defined his career.
Adams, 32, is touring behind “Easy Tiger,” his ninth country rock album
and the fourth since 2005. But he’s also selling a revised backstory, one in which sobriety and artistic focus — and not haze and profligacy — loom large.
Dressed in a suit jacket and tie, Adams spent the evening perched on the edge of a small chair, with an acoustic guitar in his lap. He played the first four songs of the set without lifting his head, his face hidden behind dark glasses.
“Thanks,” he said finally, and smiled.
Gone was the drunken petulance and volatility that marked Adams’s last Boston-area gig in 2005. Last night, the pace was slowed, the lights dimmed; songs like “Cold Roses” and “Please Do Not Let Me Go” were delivered in a bright, glassy alto.
In interviews, Adams has made much of his debt to his band, going so far as to say he would have preferred to release “Easy Tiger” under the Cardinals’ name. (The idea was nixed by Adams’s label.)
It’s not hard to see why. Easy and loose, the Cardinals provide a good foil to Adams’s emotive twang. On “A Kiss Before I Go,” a rollicking barroom stomper, drummer Brad Pemberton grounded the band, while pedal steel player Jon Graboff darkened the verse with a series of chromatic slides. Later, “Dear Chicago,” a warm acoustic elegy Adams has played for years, was expanded into a rangy jam, complete with a pair of new guitar licks and a thick low end.
But if the Cardinals have grown around Adams, much of the credit belongs to Adams himself, who has grown as an artist. His guitar lines are clear and smooth; his lyrics, especially on the sweeping “Easy Tiger” album, are big and warm-hearted (”Goodnight, Rose”) or wry and slippery (”Pearls on a String”).
Both elements, in the cozy bounds of the Somerville Theatre, were a pleasure to hear.© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.More:Globe Living/Arts stories