Ryan Adams is once again taking a cue from his younger days – this time in the form of an mid 80’s inspired album. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Adams let readers know he had quite the source of songs to pick from on this followup to his 2014 self titled album and his reworking of Taylor Swift’s 1989 . “Quite literally 80,” he said. Probably more!”
First he gave nods to Bruce Springsteen and The Smiths when he began the LP but now credits Bruce Hornsby, AC/DC and others with finding their way into his creative stream. According to Adams, he goes running in Los Angeles, where he currently lives, and listens to all sorts of songs during the exercise. “I put all the AC/DC records on from back to front, or I’ll listen to the best of stuff from the ’80s: Springsteen, or [Bruce] Hornsby, and I’ll listen to what is going on there. I was listening to AC/DC’s Fly on the Wall and that’s when I realized what I had to do for the record,” he said.
Hornsby and AC/DC go together like Hillary Clinton and Ted Nugent, so as for what the record will be about, Adams said, “I’m taking all the cool, big questions I’m asking on this record, then flipping it over, and then flipping it back to Side-A and you still have more questions…I’m a relatively convoluted soul creatively. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think the challenge for me—the Everest peak, for me—is to tell this story in 11 songs, to tell this part of my life in 11 songs. How do I make a real distinct record where anybody listens to it and says, ‘That’s the truth from beginning to end.’ So it’s like exercise. It sucks in the beginning. But then you get into it.”
