Ryan Adams Says “Farewell, Lost Highway!”

10:44 AM GMT 02/12/2008

RYAN ADAMS HAS PARTED WAYS with Lost Highway, the US-based record label who have released nine of his albums since 2001’s Gold but have struggled to see eye-to-eye with an artist loath to remain in a generic pigeonhole and prone to baffling changes of direction.

Interviewed by MOJO this month, he surprised writer Sylvie Simmons with the sudden announcement of his departure.

“Today my attorney sent me my termination agreement with Lost Highway, signed,” revealed Adams. “I'm not like, ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead,’ because I respect them and understand what we went through, how I wanted to do things a certain way, more unconventional than what they were attached to.”

Lost Highway, who’d already endured the scrappy Demolition after Gold raised expectations of more in the way of creamy, FM-roots rock, lost patience in 2003, when they baulked at the sprawling, saturnine Love Is Hell. Adams returned with the slick contemporary pop-rock of Rock N Roll, as if to say he could make this kind of commercial music with his eyes shut. In the end, Lost Highway released both.

With side projects galore – including a band with Jesse Malin instructively called The Finger – and impulsively indulging his enthusiasms (he reputedly recorded a cover of the whole of The Strokes’ album Is This It), Adams refused to be bound to the major label album-tour-album model. But Adams tells MOJO that he was always an experimenter – it’s just the label chose not to see that when they signed him.

“Heartbreaker really was the focus for that,” he argues. “[Lost Highway] saw it and thought, This has contemporary country leanings and a possible future, even though I think I expressed that there were more sides to me we should explore.”

In October, Lost Highway head Luke Lewis defended their handling of Adams, alleging that the singer had behaved like a “petulant child” in an interview with Reuters’ Jonathan Cohen.

“We took some pretty harsh criticism for putting out so much music, but we could have put out more," said Lewis. “As much as we've tried to accommodate him by putting out a lot of records, a major-label deal is probably a bit restrictive for Ryan. My sense is he'd be better served by being independent, and by that I mean totally independent.”

In the version of the Ryan Adams interview printed in this month’s MOJO magazine, Adams explains why he’s downgrading his billing (it’s now The Cardinals, not Ryan Adams & The Cardinals) before going on to discuss his skills at crochet, his extreme metal side project Werewolph, his forthcoming novel and his recent problems kicking cocaine and heroin.

For their part, Lost Highway plan to issue an Adams anthology in 2009, featuring several unreleased songs. There are certainly enough of those in the hyperactive songwriter’s attic.

See this month’s MOJO for the most revealing Ryan Adams interview ever.

Plus superb photographs by Adams’ Cardinals bandmate, Neal Casal (see above).

Hear tunes off Ryan Adams & The Cardinals’ current album, Cardinology.

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 10:44 AM GMT 02/12/2008