It’s Ryan Adams season again, that moment in a larger cycle when the American singer-songwriter reappears to remind us, in one way or another, of his unwieldy talents. At his most memorable, Adams is hawking either something truly great (2000’s Heartbreaker), something uniquely awful (2003’s Rock N Roll), or something utterly baffling (2010’s Orion).

Recorded over two nights last November, the career-spanning, solo acoustic Live at Carnegie Hall falls cleanly and decisively into the first category. Stripped of production tics and other mannerisms, those multiple versions of Adams are reduced to a single, honest voice, bringing us as close to the real thing as we’ve ever gotten.

“It’s as much me as you could have. There’s no section to hide behind, there’s no escape. There’s no fear, either,” Adams says, calling the Straight from South Carolina. “Just the destination itself, just showing up there and going, ‘Wow, I have two nights’ worth of stuff I can play.’ That felt so good. It’s such a nice reminder of why you first fear being yourself.”

There were other “elements at play”, as the performer puts it, when he made his two-night stand in the city he once called home. Most obviously, he’d just turned 40 (“And I still look like a hesher,” he snorts), but Adams also mentions a private life “in flux”, presumably a reference to his then-failing marriage to singer Mandy Moore.

Arguably even more significant was the ongoing battle with Ménière’s disease, a degenerative inner-ear condition that cost Adams two years of work after he was diagnosed in 2007. Among the treatments he sought for “this fucking stupid Ménière’s disease thing” was hypnotherapy, which he says is partly responsible for the more Zen-like manifestation we see before us.

“I have moved as far away from curating myself as I can,” he says. “I wanna know what it really is to be alive, what it really does mean to actually be in the moment.” In this case, he continues, being in the moment put what could have been a nerve-racking milestone into its proper perspective.

“It’s special but it didn’t have to be more special than anything else,” he explains. “Even though it’s prestigious and interesting, and you’re there, my thoughts weren’t on the show. My thoughts were on hanging out with my best friend, Johnny D., who lives in New York, and getting a chance to see his kids and his wife.”

Johnny D. and the family make a cameo in the affecting (and often hilarious) stage banter captured on Carnegie Hall, with Adams explaining that he taught the kid how to play a parent-baiting song called “You Can’t Tell Me What to Do”. He then rounds off the second night with a tribute to another friend, performing Bob Mould’s “Black Sheets of Rain” and remarking that the legendary Hüsker düde “reached out of the darkness” when Adams was in a particularly bleak place. He’s circumspect when asked about the friendship, but Adams could be talking about his 40-year-old self when he says: “He’s just no-bullshit. He’s seen it, done it, lived it, and survived it.”

Ryan Adams and the Shining play at the Orpheum next Wednesday (May 27).