Late Night at Ryan Adams’ Weed Robot Station

Ryan Adams sits in his Los Angeles studio once a month with some friends and a robot, gets thoroughly stoned, and broadcasts it on Apple Music as The Midnight Wave. It sounds like it shouldn’t work. It works completely.

Adams occupies a strange position in contemporary music. He’s been a critical darling and a commercial afterthought in roughly equal measure for two decades, and then in 2015 he covered Taylor Swift’s 1989—the whole album, track for track—and suddenly everyone remembered he existed. The covers were genuinely extraordinary: he found something bruised and nocturnal in songs that were originally pure pop architecture and turned them into something else entirely. Whether that was tribute or appropriation depended on your politics and your mood, but either way it was audacious.

The Midnight Wave is the same energy—unpolished, idiosyncratic, held together by taste and stubbornness. The best comparison I can make is Wayne’s World with better musical taste and no studio audience, just Adams, the people he wants to talk to, and whatever he happens to be listening to that month. It’s the kind of show that rewards you for being awake at 2am with nowhere to be.

Which is, obviously, the only condition under which you should be listening to it.