After Ryan Adams finishes "Come Pick Me Up", his definitive song and the one which ends both performances captured on Live at Carnegie Hall, he leans into the mic and screams: "THAT’S IT! YOU’RE SAD NOW!!! NOW YOU’RE SAD!!! EVERYBODY’S SAD NOW! YEAAAAHHH!!!!" The thunderous applause lets you know that everyone in attendance on this first night is in on the joke: Adams is big enough to play Carnegie Hall now, because thousands of people have discovered that listening to Ryan Adams alone is akin to giving your sadness a spa day. But "Come Pick Me Up" actually transforms into something uplifting in a live setting these days. For both the performer and the audience, “Rescue Blues” and “Why Do They Leave” and “Amy” are bittersweet, nostalgic and a platform for wisecracks and anecdotes. The audience arrives with their dates and laugh at Ryan Adams, who gets to laugh at himself. The original ache is gone and everyone can just admit to each other, "man, weren't those days something?"
Live at Carnegie Hall makes Adams’ impromptu comedy the main draw: somewhere within this three-and-a-half-hour package is one of the funniest standup records you’ll hear in 2015. And the subject of nearly all of Ryan Adams’ jokes is Ryan Adams. This is a career-spanning project, so "Ryan Adams" becomes a very, very broad topic. Adams offers countless punchlines about the prevalence of tears and rain in his music as well as his penchant for using this reputation to his advantage—"Probably like 86% of you are on Paxil, so you understand about depression. So... you're at a fucking Ryan Adams show," he cracks at one point.
The most cutting material aims at Adams' most self-serious phase, also known as his "New York" phase. On records like Gold and Love Is Hell, Adams relied on New York City to grant his music instant gravitas and urbane legitimacy. It was literally personified on his biggest single ("New York, New York"), and his residence in the East Village felt like method acting. At one point on Carnegie Hall, he claims Love Is Hell highlight "Please Do Not Let Me Go" as one of his proudest moments and a song he wrote out on a pizza box while stoned as fuck and ruminating on the purpose of shoes.
Live at Carnegie Hall is available as a 10-song sampler and a 216-minute 6xLP, though both versions have the casual Ryan Adams fan in mind. This isn’t for the hardcore Ryan Adams fan, the kind who will claim to have bootlegged B-side comps and shelved records that bests anything he’ll ever publicly release. This isn’t Ryan Adams’ Greatest Hits or the Definitive Ryan Adams either, something that will appeal to Whiskeytown and Heartbreaker fans who’ve begrudgingly stuck with him when he presumably lost his damn mind in 2003 and his edge on Easy Tiger. The setlists are thorough, but disappointingly conservative, writing out nearly all of his divisive records—nothing from Rock N Roll or 29, just a handful of B-sides and only the Love Is Hell tracks long-established as fan favorites.
All of his selections here work beautifully with just an acoustic guitar as accompaniment, and it all manages to cast his recent work in a positive light. Since they’re all subject to the same arrangements and production, "Am I Safe" or "Gimme Something Good" can be judged on the same scale as "Oh My Sweet Carolina" and "My Winding Wheel". The performances themselves are flawless and the recording is as well; everything is so crisp and clear that Carnegie Hall might as well be your living room. But the later songs remain what they were on record: tuneful, workmanlike numbers that can’t possibly generate the emotional payload of Heartbreaker but aren’t really trying to. Ryan Adams' music often gets called "effortless," which cuts both ways—it can sound elemental and eternal and also like something he dashed off in five minutes. He’s very much aware of this reputation as well—Adams ad libs a presumably impromptu funk number on piano based on a hypothetical text message exchange between Billy Ocean and Michael McDonald.
It all highlights the various odd turns Ryan Adams' persona has taken over the past 20 years. After his blatant crossover bid Gold, Adams released two records in two months—one was too "rock", the other was too "sad" and both were considered career-killers. He rebounded in 2005 with three albums that were vastly superior but no more compromising—in half a year, he was a honky-tonk traditionalist, a Deadhead and Jeff Buckley. More recently, oddball vanity projects Orion and 1984 give glimmers of hope that they may one day not be the exception to the rule set by Ashes & Fire and Ryan Adams. But Live at Carnegie Hall is the Ryan Adams Ryan Adams, the one who redefined himself at 40 years old as three things no one thought he’d ever be: reliable, consistent and a consummate people pleaser.
