Before he achieved his dream of being an
internationally known rock personality, Ryan Adams had a
band in Raleigh, North Carolina. Whiskeytown led the
wave of insurgent-country bands that came of age with No
Depression magazine in the mid-1990s, and for many
people it defined the era. Adams was an irrepressible
character, one of the signature personalities of his
generation, and as a singer-songwriter he blew people
away with a mature talent that belied his youth. David
Menconi witnessed most of Whiskeytown's rocket ride to
fame as the music critic for the Raleigh News &
Observer, and in Ryan Adams, he tells the inside story
of the singer's remarkable rise from hardscrabble
origins to success with Whiskeytown, as well as Adams's
post-Whiskeytown self-reinvention as a solo act. Menconi
draws on early interviews with Adams, conversations with
people close to him, and Adams's extensive online
postings to capture the creative ferment that produced
some of Adams's best music, including the albums
Strangers Almanac and Heartbreaker. He reveals that,
from the start, Ryan Adams had an absolutely determined
sense of purpose and unshakable confidence in his own
worth.At the same time, his inability to hold anything
back, whether emotions or torrents of songs, often made
Adams his own worst enemy, and Menconi recalls the
excesses that almost, but never quite, derailed his
career. Ryan Adams is a fascinating, multifaceted
portrait of the artist as a young man, almost famous and
still inventing himself, writing songs in a blaze of
passion. |
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