Regular readers will know that a new Ryan Adams record is cause for celebration here at the home offices of APW. Easy Tiger, his ninth, dropped last Tuesday. I was familiar with just about all the songs from his live shows over the past year or so, and especially those since September, when he really went to town on new material (including a good album’s worth of stuff that still hasn’t come out officially yet.) (If you do bittorrent, you can register at the Ryan Adams Archive and then check back often for new shows to download, usually in soundboard quality.)

While Easy Tiger doesn’t have the instant feel of greatness that Cold Roses or Gold had on first spin, it is a creeper; live with it a while and it will get into your pores and you'll find yourself singing these songs to yourself in all sorts of odd places. It is an a fine record, perhaps closest in feel to Jacksonville City Nights, the second of Adams’s 3 2005 releases and the most country. And it is seamless and consistent, the songs flowing together and hitting you as a fluid whole. The songs insinuate themselves in your psyche, simple, beautiful. Adams wears his heart on his sleeve, God bless him, and while he may strike some as a whiny, bratty prima donna, he strikes me as a genius, as pure a songwriting talent as we have in contemporary American popular music.

When I saw Adams and the Cardinals at Town Hall in December, he talked about having seven months sober. He’d had a reputation as a hit-or-miss live performer, largely depending on the extent to which you caught him on a wasted night (wasted generally equaling miss.) But since assembling the Cardinals in late 2004, his live work has been incendiary and continually improving; in that time the whole band has turned over save for Adams and drummer Brad Pemberton, and miraculously, every personnel change seems to make them better and tighter (although I still miss bassist Catherine Popper, the thinking man's alt.country rock crush.) The band has a remarkably deft touch, inhabiting Adams’s often weepy waltzes and ballads with remarkable empathy; you get the sense that he knows he can jump and they’ll catch him, so he jumps, a lot.

Easy Tiger clocks in at about 38 minutes, just like the great records by Van Morrison, the Band, Neil Young used to in the age of vinyl. It kicks off with a loping waltz, “Goodnight Rose,” which would not seem out of place on Jacksonville City Nights. Then “Two,” which Adams has been playing live for 18 months, is done as a duet with Sheryl Crow, a Cardinals fan who’s voice melds in a pretty way with his (although if Popper was still around, they wouldn’t have had to bring in a ringer…) Like a lot of Adams’s best songs, this one manages with simple language to capture the pure hurt of love; “I’m fractured, from the fall… and I wanna go home… It takes two, when it used to take only one…” On “Everybody Knows,” he sings, “You and I together, but only one of us in love… and everybody knows…”

Almost all the songs here are old school, lilting, beautifully written, and kinda sad, with one exception: “Halloween Head” is done as a punkish garage rocker; reminiscent of his Rock’n’Roll record; what keeps it from being jarring is the insane catchiness of it. “Pearls On a String,” yet another beautiful song, contains lines that nicely sum up Adams’s prolific output: “Tomorrow's on it's way/ And there's always new songs to sing.”

Meanwhile the Cardinals continue to evolve and solidify as one of the best bands around. Neil Casal’s guitar is piercing and articulate; Jon Graboff’s pedal steel provides a lot of the feel and color. Adams and the Cardinals have been touring to support this record as an acoustic 6-piece, with producer Jamie Candiloro on piano and Adams putting his guitar aside (hand trouble.) The acoustic treatment brings out the richness in this material, the timelessness of the compositions. And it is a sign of the band’s confidence and evolution that they can deliver the set without plugging in, and do so with such utter command…

They brought the act to Manhattan’s tiny Hiro Ballroom last Tuesday, essentially a record release party, and your humble correspondent was fortunate enough to be there, seven rows back center aisle. Here’s what they played:

The Sun Also Sets (ET)
Please Do Not Let Me Go
Oh My God, Whatever, Etc. (ET) >
Let It Ride
Dear John
Nightbirds
Two (ET)
Rip Off (ET)
Carolina Rain
Elizabeth You Were Born to Play the Part
I See Monsters
Blue Hotel
Halloween Head (ET)
I Taught Myself to Grow Old (ET)
Starlite Diner
How Do You Keep Love Alive?
Band intros
Winding Wheel
Blue Sky Blues
Goodnight Hollywood Boulevard
(encore) Down In a Hole

Six from the new one; plus five from 29, the third of his 2005 trilogy. And “Blue Hotel,” a song he wrote for Willie Nelson but which Adams and the Cardinals totally own; it was a highlight. The encore is an Alice in Chains cover in which they find the twang.

Adams was in outstanding voice; high, reedy, and strong, with the acoustics making him totally present and full; vocally he could do whatever he wanted. The band was physically cramped onto a tiny stage, all on acoustic instruments; Casal was stellar as usual, plucking out evocative and moving solos on melodic tunes like “Let It Ride.” Every song was better than on record; “Halloween Head” got the country treatment. “Winding Wheel,” from his first solo record Heartbreaker, was a highlight, done up in a sprightly upbeat take with Graboff’s pedal steel driving the bus. Live and acoustic, with the Cardinals breathing life into them, the songs expand and grow fuller, the way a little aeration works on a bottle of red wine. Adams was having a blast, and so was the band—who he introduced as his best friends save for his “GFF”—and certainly, the rest of us.