Matthew Ryan
(photo credit: Chad Cochran)
Matthew Ryan makes two special afternoon drinks, one from incredibly strong coffee brewed on his stovetop in a Moka pot, and the other from vanilla chamomile tea — one to perk you up and one to even you out. Hot drinks like this could seem out of place on a Tennessee August afternoon, but Ryan is a creature neither of the summer nor of the expected, and he defies both so calmly that it seems only natural to accept a hot chamomile tea on a muggy, 90-some-odd-degree afternoon.
In the writer, singer and musician’s home studio, with our hot drinks, we could be anywhere in any season. This is where Ryan’s music lives. Over a 23-year recording career and more than 20 releases, he has crafted a world of songs that span genre and inhabit a liminal space steeped in influence and place, yet also separate from it. He impresses critics, but confounds them.
At the time of our conversation, he is gearing up for a new release and also in the midst of a new recording with collaborator Neilson Hubbard for their side project, Strays Don’t Sleep.
“I think that when you first start writing, you're trying to figure out what the f—k is wrong with me? Why do I feel things this way? Why do I do that?”
Matthew Ryan’s first release, 1997’s May Day, set the stage for an exciting new songwriter cut from the same cloth as Springsteen, with healthy doses of Bob Dylan and Steve Earle. Programmers plopped him in AOR and Americana radio, and critics trotted out the expected phrases — working class, Rust Belt, gritty.
Ryan struggled to defy, or at least expand upon, that persona from the beginning. His second album, East Autumn Grin, coincided with the 1999–2000 music industry implosion, and Ryan was cut adrift. Throughout the 2000s, he went through a period of reinvention, following up a record of stripped-down story songs (Concussion), with demo collections, collaborations, synth-drenched dystopian love songs and straight-up, four-on-the-floor rock.
There was a constant that carried him, his music and his fans forward and that pushed him past easy categorization. The core of his songwriting, the central tenet of his work, is based in a deep desire to understand people — their decisions, their love, their anger and their pain. It’s a desire to make a connection. His motive to write came before the music itself, therefore it’s not dictated by style or genre. Instead, the style is bent to match the message.
“I was lucky in that I grew up in a house that had Leonard Cohen playing,” he says. “And Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell and a lot of Motown. But all of it very lyrically driven stuff that I felt was telling the truth about that relationship between our interiors and the world. I found tremendous amount of comfort in that. I wanted to be part of that … I think the reason you explorer characters is because you realize that we're all navigating a handful of plots as best we can. And we are more the same than we are different.”
Ryan became an independent artist in 2000, just at the beginning of a revolution in the way artists and their audiences connected, first through message boards, then social media. Releases could be delivered directly to fans, and fans could provide direct feedback.
As with other artists who found a way to thrive through that period to today, Ryan quickly struck a successful balance of open communication with fans and healthy boundaries. “It was very purposeful,” he says. “Particularly as you know, I felt that we were all going to be baited to kind of be the center of our own reality show. It was pretty clear pretty early on that's what we're going to be provoked to do … And I have no desire to use my children or my wife is part of my fucking ‘brand.’ And I would caution everybody to not do that. Because we're not brands. To allow ourselves to become some sort of manifestation of some capitalist idea, that is fucking dangerous, and it is in direct opposition to our humanity.”
Ryan’s audience connection is well-balanced and built from years of building relationships on the road and through digital dialogue.
“I think a lot of us make the mistake of thinking that what we have to say online is important,” he explains. “And sometimes it is. But most of the time, when you're conversing online, the first person you're conversing with is yourself. And so the reason that I reply is to enunciate that it is a conversation, and we don't have to agree for me to like you … You can't build community by always trying to sell something to it. You can't build intimacy by only talking to yourself. You can't build consensus if you're never wrong. The internet is a fucking battlefield is where perception goes to war. And we have to come to terms with how we relate to it because it's only a tool.”
On Friday August 21, Ryan will release a new song, “Rivers,” as what he calls a process single — five versions of the same song in different iterations as it progresses from phone demo to full production. The final version of “Rivers” was recorded with The Gaslight Anthem’s Brian Fallon, longtime Ryan collaborator Brian Bequette and drummer Corey Siegle.
He began writing the song in 2016, during the Presidential election cycle. “I love it when you hear a song, [and] it feels like it always existed. It's funny how, like, some songs don't do that, you know? So, if it doesn't come like that first burst of lightning … I like to let something kind of mature with me, or the other thing being that I take my own hands off of it and let it express itself. And that's kind of what happened … It's not like I planned five years ago, like, I'm gonna start this song, and I'm gonna finish it in 2020. And now I'm going to release it. It just happened naturally.
“And so, when that happens, I always listen,” he adds. “When things are hard, it doesn't mean that they're not meant to be. It just means maybe the timing just wasn't right.”
He is also on the cusp of releasing his second collaboration with Neilson Hubbard as Strays Don’t Sleep (full disclosure: I played bass on one Strays Don’t Sleep song on their first release, and on Ryan’s 2001 album, Concussion). It’s an ambient little gem, blending Hubbard’s more easygoing, sweet and lyrical style with Ryan’s incisive eye and more mature and balanced than their first release from 2006.
With more than 20 years and releases under his belt, Matthew Ryan has gained a perspective on writing and on career. The artist who has developed from the angry young man of May Day to the seasoned, slightly less-young writer of “Rivers,” is one who has learned to embrace the lessons of time.
“The processes of the things that we do are important,” he says, as we finish our conversation and tea. “And they should be built to last. We're really up against that certain sort of quickness. It's beyond disposability. It's ‘experience, experience, experience, experience, forget, forget, forget, forget, forget.’ This is no way to live. So, the idea is to quietly express that we should inhabit things more thoroughly.”
