​Ryan Adams Is Writing a Book About Whiskeytown (and a Sci-fi Novel)

BY Sarah MurphyPublished Jan 25, 2017

Ryan Adams wowed us with the unveiling of a ridiculously cool Prisoner box set (and play set) just yesterday (January 24), and now he's giving fans a totally different kind of project to look forward to.
 
He appeared on BBC 6 Music yesterday and revealed to host Lauren Laverne that he's currently working on a pair of books. One finds him dabbling in fiction with a sci-fi novel that has been in the works for a long time, while the other edges closer to a memoir detailing his early days with his band Whiskeytown.
 
Speaking to Exclaim! recently, Adams vaguely hinted at the latter, saying that "it's a book about my early experiences in music."
 
Surprisingly, for a band that earned a bit of a wild reputation in their heyday, the book is shaping up to be a light-hearted affair.
 
"I think it's going to be really funny," Adams told Laverne. "It's going to be about my sort of first years, with my first sort of known band, Whiskeytown, and all of the crazy funny things that happened. And [it's] going to hopefully have a thing where some of the other members and I talk about different specific things — I mean it was mostly just really funny and fun."
 
Details about the release of either upcoming book are still pretty scarce, but Adams did tell Exclaim! about the works he's been reading recently — and hopefully drawing inspiration from.
 
"I jump all over the place," he said. "I'll read Andre Norton stuff for a second, and I just read the Johnny Marr biography, which was really awesome. Then I switched over to the Bruce Springsteen one — which I read a part of first because I really wanted to know about a specific record, and now I'm going back to go through it proper. And then when I'm not reading that stuff, I'm usually doing research into different types of esoteric writing. It's just a lifelong thing."
 
Before we get to read his prose, we'll get to hear a new album from Adams next month. Prisoner is due out on February 17 via Pax-Am/Blue Note/Capitol.
 
Hear his full performance and interview on BBC 6 Music over here.

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