So Ryan Adams says to Steve Earle ...

... man, I'd love to have been a fly on the wall for THAT conversation!

The New York Times gives us a snippet of that conversation as it catches up with Ryan Adams, allegedly sober, back from the brink of ... something very bad. The article is chock full of juicy anecdotes, ranging from his love life to his relationship with label Lost Highway to the details of his drug consumption and how his recent, um, musical prolificness had nothing to do with the daily speedballs. Hmmm.

The article also addresses the new album, out next week. Writer Anthony DeCurtis says:

"Easy Tiger" is a virtual case study of Mr. Adams's ability to make the sort of record that people once routinely expected of him: smart, accessible, fun, poignant and potentially commercial. It's an advertisement for the once-unthinkable possibility that, at 32 and sober, Mr. Adams might finally have matured.

I promised myself I wouldn't allow Ryan Adams any more automatic passes, after the infinite blah of "29," but dammit, I may end up snapping up "Easy Tiger" after all. Call me a sucker. We'll see.