Released this week, “29” is alt-country anti-icon Ryan Adams’s third album this year, and, for those who are still keeping track, his seventh since 2000.This is a concept album with nine songs, each reflecting one of Adams’s last nine years, made in order “to write myself out of my 20s.” And what a musically brilliant, messy, and hyper-productive decade it’s been. As Adams looks back on the parade of high-profile girlfriends and low-life antics, we might too.

David Ryan Adams was born in Jacksonville, N.C., on November 5, 1974 – 28 years to the day after the birth of his spiritual ancestor Gram Parsons, and a year after his death (it makes reincarnation oh-so-easy to imagine). At 15, he began writing songs and formed a runof-the-mill punk outfit called the Patty Duke Syndrome that, judging by its lone 7-inch single, was deeply indebted to pre-grunge bands like Husker Du and early R.E.M. After relocating to Raleigh, N.C., in 1994, Adams formed Whiskeytown. “I started this damned country band because punk rock is too hard to sing,” he explained on “Faithless Street,” Whiskeytown’s 1996 debut.

Musically, the band was modeled after alt-country pioneers Uncle Tupelo – all lap-steel guitar, rattletrap drums, and creaky affect. Spiritually, however, Adams aspired more to the booze-fueled chaos of Townes Van Zandt and the Replacements. He earned a reputation as an erratic performer – shows routinely devolved into a contest of wills with the audience – and a first-rate bad boy: “I’m a fast-talking hellraising son of a bitch / and I’m a sinner and I know how to fight,” he twangs on an early Whiskeytown song, “and I can leave you if I want to little baby and I’m gonna tonight.”

By all accounts, Adams the bandleader was a ruthless autocrat who went through musicians as quick as bottles of liquor.To get away from what he called “a creative prison,” Adams moved to New York City and began working on a solo album.

“Heartbreaker” was released by the “insurgent country” label Bloodshot Records in 2000. It is a wonderfully gutsy and vivid work, undergirded by the spare-but-sturdy musicianship of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.The opening track, “To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High),” is a rollicking slice of “Maggie’s Farm”-era Dylan that somehow manages to be wistful and cocksure at the same time.”Oh My Sweet Carolina,” a quavering duet with Emmylou Harris, made Adams sound more authentically Southern than he ever had while making music there.

“Heartbreaker” found an unlikely champion in Elton John, who was so taken with it that he bought 100 copies to give out to friends. John seemed to praise it every time he opened his mouth in 2000: “If I hadn’t heard ‘Heartbreaker,'” he told one reporter, “I’d probably be lost in overproduction somewhere.”

Ironically, Adams followed it with the more production-focused – and in places, blatantly Elton John-esque – “Gold.” Though the 2001 album is littered with classic rock references, evoking Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, Stephen Stills, and Neil Young, it lacks the fire-in-the-gut quality of “Heartbreaker.” But thanks to the lead single, “New York, New York” – a frustrated love song misconstrued as a post-September 11 ode to New York City – it became Adams best-selling effort.

Adams’s story since then has been one of squandered potential and runaway prolificacy. He has gone out of his way to cultivate an image as a compulsive songwriting genius with no “off” switch, interspersing full albums with a diarrhetic flood of EPs and musical effluvia.

After “Gold” came 2002’s “Demolition,” a house-cleaning album drawn from five different recording sessions. In 2003,Adams shed his alt-country pretensions, and much of his charm, for the Strokes-y (and occasionally Springsteen-y) “Rock ‘N’ Roll.” Simultaneously, he put out the first of the “Love Is Hell” EPs, which were deemed too bleak by his label. There were also rumors of a boxed-set containing four previously unissued albums. The set was never released, but the albums materialized on the Web.

It looked like 2005 would bring more of the same. Adams announced he would release three albums within the calendar year (perhaps with an eye toward Dylan’s legendary 18-month period that produced “Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Blonde on Blonde”). What’s shocking is not just that he pulled it off, but that he pulled it off so brilliantly. For those who lost track of Adams, it’s time to start paying attention again.

“Cold Roses,” a double album released in May, revisited Adams’s country-rock roots, this time with jammy flourishes. (It so impressed Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh that he asked Adams to perform with him.) “Jacksonville City Nights,” released four months later, went further into genre territory: He called the sound “knife-fight country.” Despite his Patsy Cline arrangements, Adams managed to avoid schmaltz with his playfully sloppy lyrics and whiskey-stiffened delivery.

“29” (Lost Highway) is a fitting capstone to a remarkable year. More subdued and varied than either of the previous two releases,”29″ also feels more heartfelt.The title (and opening) track is a throbbing blues jam about aimless, reckless, luckless youth that ends in a flat, shrill voice not unlike that of Adams’s sometimes-sparring partner, Jack White. “I shoulda died a hundred thousand times / a teetering stone up the side of a building,” Adams sings of his former self.

For an autobiographical record, it has a surprisingly strong fictive strain. A storyteller is inseparable from his stories. “Carolina Rains” reads like a WPA-era tale of deferred love played against melancholy lap-steel. The album’s emotional centerpiece, “Strawberry Wine,” is a spare, folksy, eight-minute epic. Ascending to a fragile falsetto (with hints of Hank Williams in it), Adams describes a cast of deadbeats, oddballs, and miscreants just weird enough to be true.

“Can you have any famous last words if you’re somebody nobody knows,” he asks. “Go and ask Claire, she’s been dead 20 years, just look at her hair.” It’s Dylan-esque without trying too hard to be, and suggests that the coming decade could be as fruitful and fascinating as the last one.