Reviewing Whiskeytown’s Strangers Almanac for a larger magazine many years ago, I argued that if alternative country music were to produce a Kurt Cobain, Ryan Adams would be it. I was mostly wrong, so far. There was a dark clarity to Cobain’s work and a crispness, and no little amount of hard-won magic. Though Adams [...]

The first hint is the album cover, a stark, dark blue faux-leather pattern that looks and feels like the early ’70s — especially its central image, a full-bloom rose clearly echoing the cover of the Grateful Dead’s 1970 classic American Beauty. Given his recent habit of covering that band’s “Wharf Rat” at his live shows, [...]