Interview with Singer-Songwriter Matthew Ryan

Matthew Ryan - Photo by Sarah Kay

             

AHC: Over 20 years in music, that is quite a stretch of time and the musical outcome is as potent, heartbreaking and honest as music gets. What has this journey been like, the ups, the downs, the life lessons picked up along the way?

Matthew: It's surreal. Feels like I just started yesterday. I've been simultaneously lucky and unlucky. But that's true for all of us I think. I have some scars from my travels, both in the soul and on the skin. But I've had a fair amount of grins too. I've done ok for myself. It feels good, I'm hungrier now than I've ever been, and I was starving when I started. We live in a strange time. Technology is changing us in some dark and fundamental ways. Though some good comes of it as well, the good music, that draws on and from and for the real, is needed now more than ever. I think that the main lesson that I've learned is that there's no arriving, there's only traveling. There's only going and looking and working, and learning to laugh at the more absurd parts we get to know. We're all tourists. And love really is everything, it's the only engine of survival, just like Leonard Cohen said.


AHC: Your first record, May Day, came out when you were 25, and as many others have commented, it was a record wise beyond its years, sung by a voice that had a 'lived-in quality' that rang so true no one could doubt the authenticity and the bruised poetry & life it sang of. Could you talk some about that period in your life, just starting out in music, as well as playing in bands before that record came out? What was going through your mind when you landed that A&M record deal?

Matthew: It was a great demystifying. Heartbreaking to be honest. But much of that heartbreak was born in my own illusion of what MUSIC was. I didn't think of it as a business or a contact sport. I thought of it as some humanitarian cause, a higher plane, some magical community where the quality of your work alone is what mattered. And it kind of is like that in some ways and places. But the business will kill ya, or at least try. I didn't like seeing my life become a marketing campaign. I made some mistakes early on, I was too open about things that should've remained private. In many ways it was my own fault. I'm not blaming anyone, or anything. It just didn't make for a particularly beautiful waltz for me, the relationship between creativity and money and marketing. It took a long time for me to let all the aspirational business fall away. I only do what I love now, without regret. I've always been a bit strange, very sensitive. A bit of a loner. Of course when you're young, you sometimes can't tell the forest from the trees. It's all so very present that you assume it's real. I played in several bands before getting signed. All were wonderful people and trying to help as best they could. We all did things I was proud of, some music that could only happen with those particular humans. No one is replaceable. I often wish my first basement band and I had stuck it out. Naive earnestness is powerful stuff. But I had, and still have, a certain wounded-ness that only lets most people just so close. It's like I'm looking for something that I can't put a finger on. And somewhere I got the idea that I'm the only one that can figure that out. It's not something I'm proud of. It's an extension of my sensitivity I believe. I've always identified more with writers than performers. My process is more what I imagine a novelist or poet does. I love the process. But I also love playing music in a room with people too. I prefer to feel like I'm part of the people, not something people have come to observe. I love the collective weather that builds up in a room when we all decide we're in this moment together via music. 

I have to say, as insular as all that might come across, signing with A&M was an absolute thrill. Some of the people that I worked with at A&M are dear friends to this very day. I love them, and they love music in a way that seems foreign in much of the music business these days. There are pockets, an oasis here and there. But too much seems to be operating from the wrong engine. We gotta get back to art and heart, ambition only in regards to the table or house you're building where success is a result of good work. Too much seems like it's leaning for success like it is the destination. It's not. But back to A&M, one of my favorite bands from the 80's is The Blue Nile. Their albums were released by A&M here in The States. I used to drive around Newark, DE in my grandfather's Nova listening to Over The Hillside over and over again. What a beauty. When I saw the same logo, with its Horn and The A and The M, on May Day, I teared up. It was a real moment of feeling a part of the community I longed to know. It was very moving. With all that happened back then, I'd do it all twice for that sensation. It was a dream come true.


AHC: You came back swinging with a subdued but fiery acoustic album 'Concussion' after your contract with A&M dissolved, and you've forged an amazing, fearless body of work since then, collaborating with a huge variety of different artists from Lucinda Williams to Hammock. What are your feelings about the music industry, the major labels, and their quotas of hits, what works and what doesn't? It seems to me a lot of these things/air play/decisions are manufactured irregardless of the authenticity of the art itself that songwriters like yourself so tirelessly and brilliantly put forward. Does it currently seem like a rigged system for independent artists/musicians?

Matthew: Well, I think I answered most of this in your previous question. I'm not a fan of the phrase "rigged system." That suggests an allowance or excuse for defeat. I can't stand defeat. I can understand being discouraged, even needing a rest. But defeat is an ugly and useless response to struggle. I believe our culture is fucked up right now. We have our values and ethos in a collective chaos at the moment. We value success above all else. We impose all sorts of great qualities to too many people simply because they gathered wealth. We watch them on TV, we follow them on twitter. People cry over kitchen make-overs on television shows via 24 hour networks dedicated to the exploits and renovations of people wealthier than most of us. And it's scripted while being presented as real. This is a kind of soul pollution  it's not escape. Nice kitchens are great, but stirring the soul to tears? I just don't fucking understand. In the 80's marketing pivoted towards children with 24 hour programming and commercials. They basically infiltrated the imaginations of generations and taught them what and how to consume. Even what to expect from music and a song. "They," man, I hate that word too. I'm not suggesting these were conscious decisions by some nefarious illuminati. I'm saying it was a business decision: The Adults Are Too Savvy, Target The Kids!!! There's a great documentary called "The Merchants of Cool." Seek it out, watch it. It's about MTV's commodification of rebellion. It's creepy. And weird. And destructive. Rebellion is what pushes us forward. Peaceful rebellion is the generational challenge to "what is." When that's turned into a brand... Then what? What are the ramifications of that? Socially? Politically? In the human heart?

Technology has exacted another blow to our imaginations and morality with the internet. It's almost like we're under siege by the profit motive. Meanwhile some even bigger corporations are extracting the income and tools of several, dozens, if not hundreds, of former occupations. It's a consumption machine, at very high speed. They're decentralizing our collective consciousness for profit. And they're hoarding that income and wealth, and the rest of us are trying to make a living from what has been deemed "free." It's not free, billions are being made off this traffic. It's a mess. And art is suffering. So is good writing and critical thinking. And even romance. The internet is the loneliest place on earth, and we can't seem to get enough of it. It should be feeding us. The only way we turn this around is that we, all of us, demand more inclusion and work and creativity that matches the complexity of our interiors and thrusts us back into the real world. We're running on junk food now, I mean that figuratively... And I guess literally. The profit motive drove Taco Bell to feed people less a quality of meat than was required for dog food a few years back. I believe in capitalism, I believe it can work. But we need a more compassionate capitalism, a more inclusive and sustainable capitalism. What's happening right now heads nowhere useful. I don't know what all the solutions are, but I know there's a problem. Look at our election, good people are radicalizing themselves with bad information. Lies and vulgar manipulations essentially. It's a mess. But it's not a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for a great renaissance... If we demand it. 


AHC: The characters in your songs are often people struggling to set things right, fending off traumatic memories, fighting against impossible odds, trying to stay alive the best that they can with the cards they've been dealt, these are not sugar coated songs or narratives, they're straight out of life as we know it. What inspires you to tell these stories and to shine a light onto the darkest corners of human experience, the struggle, the losses, the heart ache, the survival?

Matthew: Well... Again, I think I said in my previous answer much of what drives and inspires me. I strongly dislike injustice. I hate it. I believe our job here is to try and leave things better than we found it. Or at least try. With mind, muscle, creativity, heart and hope. We gotta give it all we've got.


AHC: Your music became a sort of theme on the television show One Tree Hill, it must have been nice to have a major network show champion your music to the degree that it did, was there someone there on the show or at the network who was a listener that made that happen? Are you surprised by all the support you've received over the years from a wide variety of shows and films? 

Matthew: Early on I was very anti "selling" my music to anything other than a listener. My ethos over time, and being a father to two sons, bent. "A man's gonna do what he's gotta do when he's got a hungry mouth to feed" and all of that. I still resist participation in commercials. I would do it only if I believe with all my being in the product or business or event. As far as television shows go, these are people that are trying to tell stories as well. And Mark Schwann (the creator of OTH) is a gigantic music lover. And he was trying tell his audience (of mostly teenage girls) some important things. So yes, I was and am honored. I was in a very "thin" period of my DIY efforts when One Tree Hill and a ton of other shows started using my music. It probably saved my life as an artist. My career has yet to surface in a way where I can sustain myself from touring or residuals or albums alone. It's a by-all -means available effort. I'm grateful when listeners, or a film or TV show, pay me for my work. It makes the future more navigable. And there's an ethereal reward as well when it comes to TV and Film, those songs were written for the very individual purpose of serving my own need to create. They were born purely. So when they're used, there's a part of me that feels something useful must've been communicated if another storyteller wants to use it to enhance the weather of the story they're trying to tell. I can only think of a few experiences more potent than the marriage of film and music and story, and that's love, live music in a room with others and well... You know... There's a few others. 


AHC: Who are some of your favorite songwriters and musical influences? Are there particular albums or songs that you couldn't live without?

Matthew: The usual suspects. But my number one measure of what's meaningful as I've gone and gotten further-in is Joe Strummer. He never let me down. He threw it away and found it again. He was like a modern manifestation of Rimbaud's Season In Hell + redemption. I love his work and words for that. His work inspires me all the time to keep looking, and don't ever let a moment go uncommitted. Or at least try.

There are albums I could live without. But there's a thousand songs I certainly couldn't. Songs have been my form of church, a commiseration with the human heart. What we are, and what we do, and always what can still be. 


AHC: What do you think makes for a good song, as you're writing and composing, is there a sudden moment when you know you've found the right mix, that perfect angle of light, so to speak?

Matthew: It's a feeling. I'm only looking for a moment where all self-consciousness and posturing and bullshit or bravado seems to exit the room. It's not something I create, it's something I identify and welcome. It's not about chords or theory to me. It's about a feeling. And then I do a little editing. And then I try and record it before I start acting.


AHC: Do you remember the first song you ever wrote?

Matthew: No. 


AHC: Do you have any words of advice for young singer-songwriters who are starting out and struggling to find their voice and their way in the world?

Matthew: Be part of the solution. But don't feel like you have to have the answers, that's not your job. 


AHC: Do you have any new projects that you'd like to mention?

Matthew: I'm about to release a collection of ambient instrumentals. It's called Current Events. It's a love letter of sorts to the idea that instrumental music makes us leading men and women. I love the work of Brian Eno and Ryuichu Sakamoto, as well as a ton of other gifted provocateurs that work minus words. I'm in awe of what my friends in the post-rock bands, Hammock and Our Ceasing Voice, do. I sometimes feel instrumental music can be more generous than a song with a singer and lyrics because it encourages a person to convene with their own plots and interiors. I believe we need more of that today. Now I'm not the composer either Eno or Sakamoto is, or the arrangers Hammock or Our Ceasing Voice is, but I was motivated by instinct and love. I think it turned out good, feels like a particularly cinematic drive with an emotional hum to me. I'd like to invite anyone who's still reading at this point to visit www.matthewryanonline.com to give it a listen. It'll be released very soon, somewhere around the end of September, early October. I'm also finishing up a new album, we're mixing it right now. It'll be released in 2017. And I'm out touring for a good part of this Autumn. So you know, I'm keeping myself busy.