Ryan Adams’ Road to Recovery

Ryan Adams

 

After major health scare, the alt-rocker readies his confident new album

A few years ago, after multiple canceled tours and the breakup of his band the Cardinals, Ryan Adams sought a hypnotherapist for help with Ménière’s disease, an inner ear disorder. “I said, ‘I’m not playing music anymore and I’m scared to play live and I feel jaded. All I ever do is disappoint people and I leave the stage,” he says, sitting in the lobby of New York’s Bowery Hotel in a denim jacket, before describing the condition’s effect: “All of a sudden you start seeing double and then my hand starts shaking, and then it’s like you’re in an elevator and the bottom just drops out and your bones feel 1,000 pounds.”

The therapy, along with medical marijuana, helped Adams control these attacks, and after scrapping his second stripped-down LP with producer Glyn Johns, he relocated to his newly built L.A. studio, Pax-Am. “It’s like the Millennium Falcon,” says Adams, “so many possibilities.” There, he joined bassist Tal Wilkenfeld and a drummer he found working in a music store to begin writing songs influenced by his teenage favorites the Smiths and the Velvet Underground. “I was like, “I’ll go in with a couple bros at seven o’clock and just jam. We would, like, smoke a bowl and drink some tea – and the words came free-flowing out of me,” he says. “It gives me chills just talking about it.”Adams sounds re-energized on the resulting record, a self-titled album full of swaggering, emotionally vulnerable rockers like “Trouble” and “Stay With Me,” which both feature razor-sharp riffs and big hooks in the vein of Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes. On “Shadows,” a ballad pondering a fading relationship, he howls, “How long do I have here with you?”

Now that the album is just about ready go – it will be released September 9th on the Pax-Am label – Adams is gearing up to take the songs on the road for his first tour with a live band since 2009. “I’m ready for the challenge. I just did that last [acoustic] tour, and I’m so proud of that – like, I am so proud. I was getting really tired and the more tired you get, the better the chances are that you’re going to get screwed up. But, when I play music now, it’s the safest place.”

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Krist Novoselic Comments on Israel-Palestine Conflict, Defends Vedder

“It is the knuckleheads on both sides that should be criticized and not the singer from a rock band”

Krist Novoselic
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.

 

July 21, 2014

Former Nirvana bassist and political activist Krist Novoselic has voiced his support for Eddie Vedder’s recent anti-war statements in a post on his website. Over the past week, the Pearl Jam frontman has made several comments condemning war in general. When the Israeli media interpreted the statements as referring to that country’s ongoing conflict with Palestine, Vedder posted a statement to Pearl Jam’s website saying, “War hurts. It hurts no matter which sides the bombs are falling on.” Novoselic also interpreted the comments to be about Palestine and Israel and wrote to Vedder, “I stand with you my friend!!!”

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“The people of Palestine and Israel deserve peace and prosperity,” the bassist wrote. “It is time to stop repeating the same old arguments, dogma and hate speech. It is the knuckleheads on both sides that should be criticized and not the singer from a rock band. In addition, both sides need to make hard decisions about finding a settlement to the catastrophe that is Israel/Palestine.”

For most of his 550-word missive on the subject, Novoselic addressed the decades-long conflict between the two countries. He praised Israel for encouraging religious freedom in its country and acknowledging that millions of Palestinians feel that Israel has displaced them. But he also pontificated on the long-term effects of war, specifically between Israel and Palestine. “[Palestinian] Hamas’ policy of not recognizing Israel is a dead end,” he wrote at one juncture. Elsewhere, he wrote, “You can give any anecdote you want about how small Israel is in comparison to the rest of the Middle East but the sentiment is still there – Palestinians feel that their land was taken away.”

“Our world is connected as never before,” the bassist wrote. “People from all corners of the planet share culture and commerce at the click of a mouse. In contrast to this great convergence of humanity, Israel is building tall concrete walls while Palestinians fire rockets over them. There’s a shared recent history between these people, and I think there could be a shared future that’s more in tune with what’s going on with our ever-connected universe.”

Novoselic compared the conflict to the way Ireland settled “the troubles” of the 1960s in Ireland, and how the “19th Century idea” of Yugoslavia ultimately fell apart. “In both these cases, a resolution of the conflict was buttressed by the promise of the stability needed for prosperity to happen,” wrote Novoselic, who was born to immigrants from Croatia, a country that was part of Yugoslavia until the early Nineties.

“Thank you Eddie Vedder for speaking up for peace in our world,” Novoselic wrote. “Eddie has gotten some criticism over comments he made about the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis. That situation has been messed up for so long, it is no wonder that even mentioning it is toxic. Let’s face it, the relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis is a disaster! I don’t know how many times I have heard the same explanations and excuses and it matters not, there is a continuing catastrophe between those two peoples.”

Most recently, Vedder spoke against war at his July 18th solo concert in Portugal, where he also played what he called “the most powerful song ever written,” John Lennon’s “Imagine.” “If you’re anti-war it doesn’t mean you are ‘pro’ one side or the other in a conflict,” he said.