Pop Quiz: Ryan Adams

Pop Quiz: Ryan Adams

Aidin Vaziri | Yes, Ryan Adams just released "Easy Tiger," a Top 10 album that features a sweet duet with Sheryl Crow and finds him regaining focus in more ways than one. And yes, we read that thing where the 32-year-old North Carolina singer-songwriter admitted he spent the past few years hooked on speedballs, a cocktail of cocaine and heroin. We know about all those self-indulgent albums he put out, too - three alone in 2005, including one unwieldy double-disc set. But, frankly, we only had time to talk about the really important things: whether we should buy a crummy old watch on eBay or not.


Ryan Adams
Q: Are you actually wearing a calculator watch on your album cover?
A: Yeah. It busted, though. I actually ended up getting a new one. I lucked out. I was looking at some antique market-type places and I found the one right after that called the Casio DBC-62 DataBank World Time, which would be like finding the iPod with the picture.
Q: Why would you need all that technology on your wrist?
A: They're handy. I like them because they're very simple and I can set two time zones on there, so if I'm in Europe or something like that, where one show could be a completely different time zone, I can at least know what time it is at home.
Q: So you don't wake up any of your loved ones?
A: Well, there aren't many, but I can at least know when to send e-mails.
Q: How do you like the calculator function?
A:I don't know how to use the calculator. I've been shown how to do it once, but I pretty much forgot right after. My alarm used to go off every day. The original watch, someone threw it onstage, so I didn't have the instruction booklet or anything.
Q: Someone just threw a valuable piece of jewelry like that onstage?
A: Well, I don't know. I just saw it onstage, and it didn't belong to any band members. It wasn't there when we started. So I had it. But the alarm was set to 4:20.
Q: Is that why it says 4:20 on the cover?
A: Yeah. But I didn't know how to shut it off, so it would go off at 4:20 in the afternoon and 4:20 at night. It didn't go off that long, but it was funny at first and then, after a long time, it got really annoying.
Q: Did you try taking a hammer to it?