Pitchfork

Can it be that a whole month has gone by without a mention of Ryan Adams in this here news section? And the last tidbit we reported was merely his participation in a Katrina relief benefit concert? Crazy!

Well, the man who put the "r" in "pRolific" isn't going to let the rest of 2005 pass in silence. Most notable on Adams' year-end slate is the December release of his third and (possibly) final full-length of the year, 29. The LP stocking stuffer is presently in the can, and now sports a firm release date of December 20.

We've chronicled 29's development from larvae to pupa to caterpillar to beautiful butterfly throughout the year. In a July Pitchfork interview with Amanda Petrusich, Adams described the album like so:

"That one's really fucked up. It has nine songs, and all the songs are nine minutes long, they're all story-songs. And it's basically just me and a piano, me and a guitar, with [producer] Ethan [Johns]. It's really cerebral. The theme of it was that I wanted to write a record where I could write myself out of my twenties. So for each year of my life, in my twenties, I kind of assigned different parts of my character, I gave them names. The last song is a song from the perspective, believe it or not, of a ghost. When it's just passed out of a body, and it goes 'Don't go to the light/ I'll show you how to haunt.' This spirit is trying to conjure this dead child, this dead person, back to the house where they died. So they can haunt it. It's really fucked up."

We guess that means it's fucked up.

Adams also has a few live dates on the horizon. Alongside trusty sidekicks The Cardinals, he'll open for a pair of mid-November Willie Nelson shows at the Beacon Theater in New York City, before closing out with a free show during the Wall Street Rising series of free concerts at NYC's Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

Big Apple Nights:

11-16 New York, NY - Beacon Theater *
11-17 New York, NY - Beacon Theater *
11-18 New York, NY - Tribeca Performing Arts Center

* with Willie Nelson

And finally, the denim-clad troubadour has a couple of TV appearances scheduled for the coming months. On November 28, he's expected to perform the Heartbreaker classic "Come Pick Me Up" on "The Late Show With David Letterman". Why that oldie? Because it's on the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe's new movie Elizabethtown, that's why. An unreleased Adams track, "Words", appears in the film, but didn't make the soundtrack disc. A Ryan Adams and the Cardinals "Austin City Limits" set will debut on PBS on January 21, so set your TiVo now.