Charging up a flight of red carpeted steps, he leads the way to the main tracking room, describing its setup and sound in manic rapid-fire detail. “I thought I was trying to model it after Motown or the old RCA studios,” he says. “I put in a black-and-white linoleum floor, wood paneling, and these sconces. But when I was finished I realized I’d kinda built a little Masonic hall. Which is funny, ‘cause my grandfather was a mason.”

As he says this, Adams flicks on a giant ornamental lamp, bearing a Masonic symbol and the words: “We Have Seen His Star In the East …And Are Come To Worship Him.”

Around the corner — past large framed posters of Sonic Youth’s Sister and H.R. Giger’s creature from Alien — is Adams’ office, packed with books, records, and guitars, all neatly arrayed along the walls. He ducks behind his desk and rifles through some boxes, digging up copies of the recent 7-inch singles put out by the record label arm of Pax-Am.

In addition to his forthcoming self-titled LP, Adams is releasing a series of non-LP singles, every month for the foreseeable future. Of course, in Adams’ universe the term “single” is a relative one; his first, 1984, was actually an 11-track blaze of Replacements/Hüsker Dü pastiches, all in about 15 minutes. “That one came out with no press really, and it sold out in an hour or two,” he says.

Adams has always had an active online presence, regularly posting troves of unreleased tracks and lengthy message-board screeds against his perceived enemies; he now he uses his Twitter account to connect more cannily with his 600,000-plus followers. “The [new] single, I just put up a link on Twitter and fucked off and went about my day. I checked back a little later and it was totally sold out. I was like, Duuuude, are you kidding?”

When Adams is fully engaged, his eyes widen, his bright blue pupils flaring dramatically. His casual conversation comes out as a deluge of dudespeak: Everything is “wicked” or “totally sick” or “so fuckin’ rad.” His references are all Star Wars and sci-fi, superheroes and ‘80s pop culture. Sometimes he’ll bark out his words in imitation of Pee Wee Herman or Grover. And when he’s particularly proud of something he’s done or discovered, he’ll punctuate the announcement of his achievement with, “MmmmBooom!”

The latest in Adams’ single series is titled “Jacksonville” — the name of his hometown on the eastern coast of North Carolina. The city has loomed large in the iconography of his songs since the beginning of his career 20 years ago, as both a source of nostalgia and a place to escape.

David Ryan Adams was born there, the seat of Onslow County, on Nov. 5, 1974. He was the middle child — between an older brother and younger sister — of a contractor father and an English teacher mother who split when he was 4. “My mother was working, my old man was out of the picture,” he says. Pressed to say more about his father, Adams demurs: “It's too hard to describe in a couple sentences.”

Over the years, however, Adams has devoted more than a few lines to the topic. The betrayals of a besotted patriarch haunt his songs all the way back to his earliest efforts. His 2009 volume of poetry, Infinity Blues, includes a harrowing, seemingly autobiographical recollection titled “To My Father, the Drunk.” It tells of a family split by an affair, forced to live “in housing unfit for children” where “roaches … crawled over my brother’s face.” It ends with the lines: “I was back then, nothing but scars. But for my father, the drunk, who married a stripper when I was five. I hope you close your eyes peacefully and die.” (For the record, Adams says now, “There's nothing there to unearth ... Of course I talk to my family. But that’s too personal for me to get into.”)

Adams was essentially raised by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather was a Marine who’d fought in both World War II and Korea. The military cast a shadow on Adams’ early life — Jacksonville had long been dominated by the nearby Marine base, Camp Lejeune. Growing up during the Reagan years, Adams had a bifurcated view of his hometown.

“On the very edge of [Jacksonville] there used to be a line,” he explains, making imaginary marks along his desk, “where it was pawn shop, tattoo shop, strip club, pawn shop, tattoo shop, pawn shop, strip club, car dealership, pawn shop … like all the fucking way down. Then, there were all these big pine trees, and behind them was the military base. And the base was between us and the beach. They took all that land.”

Adams' childhood in the “old city” of Jacksonville was a more idyllic vision. “I lived in this beautiful neighborhood that had a duck pond and I just remember big open spaces and big thunderstorms — I’m talking, like, massive bright daytime clouds. Right around there was a Piggly Wiggly, a local pharmacist, a tobacco shop that … just saying that makes me want to weep. ‘Cause I remember my grandfather smoking a pipe and the smell of his tobacco.”

Not for the last time, Adams' voice softens and his eyes glisten when talking about his beloved “papaw” and “geemaw.” “I became who I am now because of my grandparents. I grew up sleeping at the foot of their bed between them, watching the Johnny Carson show. If my papaw would fall asleep early enough, then I could watch David Letterman. It’s one of my first memories: watching someone who’s making me laugh.” (Years later, Adams, who’s become a Letterman favorite, performing over a dozen times on the show, would share the story with him. “And we ended up having this beautiful correspondence,” he says. “Letterman’s always been a gentleman to me.”)

In elementary school, Adams was sickly and had trouble sleeping — a condition that would plague him for much of his life. He was often allowed to skip class and stay home with his grandparents. “I’m not saying I consult with psychics or seers, but I know some of those people," he says. "One of them told me: ‘You choose the parents you want to have as a spirit. You chose to be close to your grandfather and grandmother. You needed to be near them, because you've been following them for eternity.’ I like that idea. Maybe it’s all bullshit. But it really felt true to me.”

He learned to knit and crochet alongside his grandmother and was taught to prize the value of craft from his grandfather, a master mason. His hyperactive imagination was fueled by a passion for reading — first comic books and then, by 13, the sex and surrealism of Henry Miller. He flashed promise as a visual artist early on — for a while it seemed that might be his professional path. He would write and illustrate his own disquietingly strange short stories. His grandparents indulged and encouraged both his creativity and eccentricity.

“I was not some pretend goth,” says Adams. “I really would go into the woods at night alone, and be there by myself and sit in a tree in total darkness.” After a few hours he would hear his grandmother at the edge of the woods yell out after him: “'David Ryan, come on home, now, you bin out thar’ long enough.' And I'd come out of the fucking woods wearing a black cape. I was that guy. I was totally living in a different world.”

When he got older, he fell in with group of skateboarders in junior high and high school. He’d already been turned on to the Scorpions and Ozzy Osborne by his older brother, but it was a surrogate brother figure, a kindred small-town spirit and local record store clerk named Jere McIlwane, who further expanded his horizons to include punk. (McIlwane would die of a heroin overdose in the mid-‘90s.) Through other friends he would discover The Smiths and Misfits and come to worship the bands' flamboyant frontmen, Morrissey and Glenn Danzig, who represented the twin poles of post-punk masculinity.

The record bins of Jacksonville’s pawn shops would shape his tastes further. It was at a place called Pawn & Guns that he found a copy of Fuck, by an obscure L.A.-based SST band called The Leaving Trains. “Which is still my favorite record of all time,” he says, citing the song “What Cissy Said” as his epiphany. “That filled me with so much unbelievable, maddening passion to play music. I taught myself drums; it took no time. I taught myself to play guitar; it took no time. I could play bass right away.”

Almost immediately he was writing songs and making recordings on a little four-track. “When I was in high school, I used to pass out these cassettes that said ‘Pax-Am Records.’ That was my imaginary label. They were little compilations where I played all the instruments — one track would be like a Pet Shop Boys-sounding band, another would be a metal-sounding band or a surf-rock band. I had fake names for these groups, but it was all totally me. Nobody cared, of course.”

Eventually, he and McIlwane formed a series of buzzy post-punk bands: the Patty Duke Syndrome, Blank Label, Kotten. One day the vocalist for Patty Duke Syndrome didn’t show up for rehearsal, so Adams started singing, making stuff up off the top of his head. “I remember Jere looking at me like, ‘What the fuck?’ I was thinking, ‘Whoa, I didn't know I could do that.’ But from then on, I knew.” Music soon became so all-consuming that by his sophomore year, Adams quit school (though he’d eventually get his GED).

The real turning point came after the death of his grandfather in late 1991. “That really hurt me, and I didn't know how to deal with that,” he says. Not long after, his beloved cat Bully died as well. He took it as a sign. “I cried for three days straight, just weeping. On the third day, I packed one red book bag, filled it with some clothes and a couple Hüsker Dü cassettes, and left home.”

Though he couldn’t even drive, Adams knew it was time to go. "Where I was from, people were dying, going to jail, or having kids at 19 and never leaving. Strangely, I knew that it was going to be totally OK. Like, ‘This is what you're meant to do; nothing will ever fuck with you.’ Maybe my grandfather’s spirit was with me. But something did guide me, ‘cause I definitely had a clear path.”