Ryan Adams

David Ryan Adams was born in military town Jacksonville, NC. When he was nine, his father left the family and David was raised by his mother, an English teacher. She cultivated in him fondness for reading. As a child, he liked Edgar Allan Poe especially, and in his youth he was into Henry Miller and John Kerouac. Having mastered the guitar, he unfinished the high school and went into music. He started as a member of several minor punk rock bands, but on moving to Raleigh, Adams formed a band of his own, Whiskeytown, and cooperated with Caitlin Cary, a singer and a violinist. Their debut album, Faithless Street, was released in 1996 to the acclaim of critics who compared this work with the music of Gram Parsons. Shortly, followed the second LP Stranger's Almanac (1997), but the third album, Pneumonia, was kept shelved in the studio due to the legal issue caused by the merger of Universal and PolyGram.

In 2000, Adams released his first solo album, Heartbreaker. It featured a skillfully performed combination of country, folk and classic rock, proving the artist’s great writing talent. When Pneumonia was finally delivered to stores in 2001, it was deemed a rather Adam’s work than a release by Whiskeytown. As the new millennium had arrived, Adams proved himself as uniquely laborious and prolific musician. He produced approximately an album per year, in addition to the songs posted on his website. In 2001, Adams released Gold with the track New York, New York. The video for this song was shot a week before the 9/11 attacks and applied the image of the World Trade Centre towers as background. It was extremely topical after the attacks and had a wide play on MTV. The album was a good seller in the USA and earned two nominations for Grammy.

Then Adams released Demolition (2002), composed of the songs from the unreleased 48 Hours, and The Suicide Handbook, massively distributed on-line. In 2003, he recorded tracks for the two following albums, Rock N Roll (2003), and Love is Hell (2004). The latter included the cover of Oasis’ Wonderwall to bring Adams another nomination for Grammy. At one of the concerts during the promotional tour for this album, Adams fell down from the stage to break his arm, which forced him to postpone a number of gigs. 2005 saw Adams produce Cold Roses, and Jacksonville City Nights, recorded with The Cardinals, and the solo album 29. During the following two years, he was giving concerts and producing the albums for the other artists. Adams released his ninth studio work, Easy Tiger in 2007. Then he announced that he had struggled with alcohol and drugs and eventually managed to part with them. In the same year, Adams released another album, Follow the Lights. The new studio work by Ryan Adams and The Cardinals is called Cardinology and was released in 2008. The singer also revealed his plans to publish the book Infinity Blues. The musician’s discography was enlarged by a strong heavy metal album Orion in 2010. Ryan dedicated that work to Voivod’s guitarist Denis D'Amour, who died in 2005. Adams stated that Voivod’s creativity had always been a real source of inspiration for him, and Orion turned out to be a way to thank D'Amour for his music.