"Don't ask her for the water/'Cause she'll teach you to cry," Ryan Adams offers, with a mouthful of spit and an astute sense of resignation. The line isn't delivered with anger, but with awe. It's off-handed wisdom from a man who, at least in his art, seems to love hard and serious. The song is called "Don't Ask for the Water," and it appears on Adams' only solo album, Heartbreaker. "Don't ask her for the water," he intones, "'Cause she'll swallow you down." The listener gets the sense that, at some point, Adams has obviously asked, and that, unfazed, he will never stop asking.

Having loosed himself from the restraints of his less elegant quintet, Whiskeytown, Adams has freed himself up to do what he does best: write quiet, rock-tinged country music, and sing it to people. The songs are sketches of a listless romantic, too unsatisfied to quit searching for meaning, while too homesick for the unknown to actually settle on anything or anyone. On "Oh My Sweet Carolina," the narrator implores his own disposition: "May you one day carry me home."

Country music is arguably the finest of all forms when it is evocative like that--emotional pleas, or intuitive reflections, offered up by a fragmented individual to the self or to another person. Such songs are often most telling when characterized by hard thought, booze, and the acceptance of personal inadequacy. Which is just the kind of country Adams manages to pull off. His voice is thick with experience, but bright with youth. His live shows exude a drunkenness--he's always drunk at them--but more than that they reveal him to be energetic and reckless, if slightly stunned by the immediacy of his own experience; as though he is awakening with every revelation to nausea, but carried by grace and an indefatigable desire for love and meaning.

"Take me out, fuck me up, steal my records... I wish you would," he sings on "Come Pick Me Up." It's the ballad of the self-loather, and simultaneously the challenge of the willful self-actualizer. As Adams performs his stunning songs onstage, alone with an acoustic guitar, one senses how essential life is to him.