What to do if it’s a downer?

Every pop fan is a critic at heart, never more so than when listening to a favorite artist’s new album for the first time. The invariable question: Is it as good as the past ones?

The issue is complicated when that fan also happens to be the president of the artist’s record label, which brings us to the sticky case of singer-songwriter Ryan Adams and Lost Highway Records’ Luke Lewis.

As a fan and record executive, Lewis is concerned with both Adams’ art and his career momentum. When he listened to Adams’ proposed new album for the first time early this year, he tried to imagine what his fans would think, especially critics whose acclaim has been important in building an audience for the boy wonder.

After hearing the album, titled “Love Is Hell,” Lewis sat down with Adams and said gently, “I think you can do better.”

Adams was hurt, and he said so later in interviews. “I’ve heard adjectives like ‘incredibly too depressing’ and --this one’s funny -- ‘dark,’ ” he told Rolling Stone last spring.

Soon the word “rejected” began appearing in stories about the shelved album, as Adams returned to the studio to work on a different, more accessible, high-energy album. Lewis liked the new one, “Rock N Roll,” and released it last month to generally positive reviews. Rolling Stone gave it four out of a possible five stars.

Sensitive to Adams’ feelings about “Love Is Hell,” Lewis then came up with a plan to release it as two budget-priced mini-albums, eight songs on the first volume, seven songs on the second.

While “Rock N Roll” was promoted and marketed like a regular album, “Love Is Hell” was slipped into stores on a low-key basis so radio programmers and retailers wouldn’t be confused over which was the official new release.

Volume 1 was released the same day as “Love Is Hell,” and Volume 2 was delayed until this week.

With the promotion, “Rock N Roll” has sold more than volume one of “Love Is Hell,” 84,000 copies to 39,000 -- though the gap may narrow as more fans learn that the mini-albums have more of the graceful, evocative edges of Adams’ earlier work than the more conventional “Rock N Roll” does.

But fans may differ. That’s the challenge of working with an artist so talented and prolific. Rolling Stone, for instance, has also given the two mini-albums four stars.

The rock media are so intrigued with the drama surrounding the albums that rival record executives might think the whole flap is just some shrewd marketing ploy. But Lewis doesn’t sound like a man who is altogether comfortable with the situation.

“I’ve seen the word ‘rejected’ used in connection with the ‘Love Is Hell’ album in some stories, and that’s not the spirit of our conversation,” Lewis said. “I told him I felt he could do better, and that’s a brutal thing to have to say to an artist. It’s really a subjective thing, and I said it as much as a fan as a record company guy.”

He looks back on his role in questioning “Love Is Hell” as challenging Adams, and he thinks it worked.

“I thought the new music he made after our meeting was fabulous,” he said by phone this week from his office in Nashville. “For my tastes, ‘Rock N Roll’ is a better record than ‘Love Is Hell.’ He was really excited about the album, too. It’s not like he brought back something he wasn’t proud of. It was just a different side of him.”

“Love Is Hell” didn’t represent the first time Lewis agonized over the release of Adams’ material. Adams, who can write as fast as an Olympic sprinter can run, had four more albums in the can by the time his second album, “Gold,” was released in 2001, and Lewis thought about putting them into a boxed set. He dropped the idea, though, because he feared a boxed set might look presumptuous for an artist still in his 20s.

Lost Highway finally released some of that material last year on “Demolition,” an album that was acclaimed in some publications almost as much as Adams’ formal albums, 2000’s “Heartbreaker” and “Gold.”

But it was time now for an “official” new release, and Lewis didn’t think “Love Is Hell” fully lived up to the expectations of “Heartbreaker” and “Gold.” He had a point: The best half-dozen songs on “Love Is Hell,” including “Please Don’t Let Me Go” and “Hotel Chelsea Nights” on Volume Two, are the foundation for a greater album. They reflect the burned-out tone of such rock masterpieces as the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” and Neil Young’s “Tonight’s the Night.”

But not everything on the mini-albums works. The music is consistently stark, almost funereal in places, and the exploration of emotional wounds isn’t always revealing.

Apparently not wanting to keep answering questions about the perceived flap, Adams has declared a moratorium on interviews while he hits the road with a new band, playing songs from both albums.

In an interview in the current issue of the rock magazine Amplifier, however, he seems to have softened his earlier criticism: “They didn’t tell me I couldn’t release it; their point at the time was they weren’t sure it was the right thing to put out then. And I think they had a point, but I don’t think that way.... I see things as rock ‘n’ roll music, and they think like a business. Sometimes it’s for the best.”

Meanwhile, Lewis, whose Lost Highway catalog also includes acclaimed works by Lucinda Williams and Johnny Cash, continues to reexamine his relationship with Adams.

“What this experience has taught me is that I need to rethink some of the assumptions of the record business when it comes to Ryan, especially the idea that an artist can only put out one album a year without confusing everyone,” he said.

“Looking back, I might have better served Ryan if I found a way to release each of those earlier albums as he finished them, even if that meant three in a year. He’s so prolific that he will sometimes go into the studio for a week or three days and come out with this mountain of music, and then he’s off to something else.”