The fringe benefits of hanging around

A little over halfway through his Dec. 6 Carnegie Hall engagement, Ryan Adams made a joke: “I don’t know why I write these kinds of songs, I’m not sensitive at all. I’m a bastard” It wasn’t his funniest joke of the night (that might have been his running joke on C+C Music Factory, more on that later) but it elicited some of the loudest guffaws and applause from the 3,000 or so gathered in the historic hall.

It was funny because we all knew how far he’d come. Eleven years since he embarked on a solo career and began his run as music’s latest a-hole genius — a mantle inherited from the Gallagher brothers and since passed on to people like Kanye West — it seemed like he was living the lyrics of Lucky Now, the carrier single of his excellent new album “Ashes & Fire”: “I don’t remember were we wild and young… I feel like somebody I don’t know / Are we really who we used to be?” Gone were the days of drunken onstage outbursts and bratty interview tantrums. The 2011 model is patient, meticulous, self-aware, and surprisingly, humorous.

Near the end of his set, doing a bit of extemporaneous singing on an improvised song about an alien who called him a jerk, he cracked: “Everybody says that. I’ll just go write an emotional song about it.” Even when his patience at the concert was tested, he turned to humor. Supporting himself on acoustic guitar and piano, he chided a persistent flash photographer in one of the front seats. “It might be faster if I just take a picture of myself and e-mail it to you after,” he joked, referencing the woman’s outdated camera.

New album “Ashes & Fire”

That woman should’ve known better, though. While he rocked as hard as anybody rolled during the early parts of his career — as a member of country-rock group Whiskeytown and the classic rock-initiated performer of his early solo career — everything was pared down for this tour. With Adams alone onstage with just two guitars, a piano, and a harmonica, he moved from ballad to ballad: each of them slow, elegant almost-prayers. His songs, which have always been about perpetual distance and bracing comfort anyway, flourished in the setting. An already elegant song like Two, a country-tinged ballad from his 2007 album “Easy Tiger” featuring Sheryl Crow on background vocals, grew more immediate as a quiet meditation, with Adams’ cooing “It takes two when it used to take only one,” slow like honey.

The song that made his career early on, the rollicking New York, New York from his 2001 “Gold” album — which gained additional gravitas post-9/11 with a music video featuring a young Ryan Adams running through New York sights like the Twin Towers — was the definite high-point in the set. In his first New York date in three years, the Chelsea Hotel-bred performer chose to play it soft and quiet, as a piano ballad instead. Ten years after 9/11, the song (lyrics like “The world won’t wait, so I better shake / Hell, I still love you, New York”) has become a sort of hymn for the city’s children, the choir-like singalong at the Carnegie Hall date the roof-raising proof of that.

“I was a nervous young man,” he tells Esquire magazine in a recent interview. “And I was so enthusiastic and earnestly in love with so many things that I tried too hard. I tried really, really hard. And I made a lot of mistakes. I was afraid of a lot of stuff. And I kind of feel bad for that person I was.” But with the growth he has acquired through the years — the kind of growth sobriety and a grounded former pop star wife (Mandy Moore) will give you — he has outlived the cliché. At 37, he’s a decade away from the 27 Club that recently claimed Amy Winehouse. And with his new batch of focused songs and now more consistent performances, he’s finally living up the promise of his classic early albums.

When love comes to town: Sobriety and a seemingly stable home life with former pop star Mandy Moore have tempered his demons.

“C + C Music Factory gave cameras away (at concerts),” he joked, referencing the early ’90s disco pop group. “That’s something I’d like to see, C + C Music Factory at the Carnegie.” It was pretty ludicrous of him, making fun of bubblegum pop when his wife made a career out of that genre, too. But hey, Mandy Moore works with The Weepies now, and as his Carnegie Hall performance proved, we all grow up eventually.