Matthew Ryan
A Bridge Between The Young Guy And The Real Tragedy
Sep 17, 2008
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Misundercould
unreleased
This song is a love letter to underachieving. I've spent half of my life trying to be invisible. When I think about the city where I grew up, that makes sense; because to be invisible meant you could avoid trouble. Then I started my career in music, and I spent years doing all I could to remain just at the waterline. Maybe there's a certain beauty in maintaining your struggle, it can help to keep you soulful. And it's true that where I came from it was viewed as wrong or poisoned to have too much. It took me years to realize that was bullshit. Soul has nothing to do with economics.
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American Dirt
original version appears on Matthew Ryan Vs. The Silver State
I grew up loving the big music. It was cinematic stuff with big ideas and endless reverb. To me, The Clash was big music. They let everything that they loved in and from the beginning they were leaning for big sweeping inclusiveness. Some, maybe even most say they were punk. But I disagree. "American Dirt" is my ode to the big music. At the center of this song is an idea. The idea is that much of our culture has turned into a blizzard of static, sales pitches and useless entertainment; the song is urging anyone that will listen to start to reject some of these things. It's saying that we are more than what we buy, and that intimacy, real intimacy is the one thing worth leaning for.
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Jane, I Still Feel the Same
original version appears on xMatthew Ryan Vs. The Silver State
This is a song about the choice we all end up making between innocence and experience. It doesn't preach or prefer one over the other. But I believe it should be said that both offer their own consequences. Love is the prefect metaphor. It's also the perfect machine for turning all of us into literature. I was thinking of some very specific pictures when I wrote this.
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They Were Wrong
original version appears on Matthew Ryan Vs. The Silver State
A song about friendship. Sometimes, it's the people we choose to have in our lives that often bring the greatest reward or life support. "They Were Wrong" is about that moment of nuclear clarity when someone comes to you and they have your back and they're willing to lay all the truth they can offer to you to save you from the past that might haunt, or daunt you, or turn you into a failing light. Friendship laced with real love and truth can turn all of us into superheroes. "Matthew Ryan Official Site":http://www.matthewryanonline.com
A mouth and eyes can get tainted just by doing what they're supposed to do, just acting normally. They have no choice but to feel and sense depreciating terms and recollections. They have no side-tracks, just the directions they've been pointed and the objects that the hands offer it. We needn't stop with those two. The witnessed depreciation can go on and on, down the pole - from the eyes and the mouth to the skin that feels it from head-to-toe. Not only do all of the parts conclude what's been concluded since there have been ways to express it - that the day we're born is the day we start to die - but they go one step further and conclude that they're not the only ones.
It's an obvious kind of understanding, but it's grounding when it's really allowed to be soaked in, to look around and get that everything - from what it is now, will surely be gone someday and there might even be a shortcut to that fulfillment. There is a detachment from the wholesome way that our senses bring in the information that they do that makes it all take on a gritty, ragtag aftertaste that's bitter like deprecation. We learn that some of the things that we'd rather not believe to be the way they actually are happen to be so - through all of the data that is pulled in by those reluctant eyes and ears and mouths and skin. Matthew Ryan has a way of making your body quiver with his broken-hearted, rootsy Americana. He makes the eyes feel as if they've been transplanted out of a deceased or nearly deceased 95-year-old man who had survived the Great Depression. He makes the mouth feel as if the words that are coming out of it don't have your taste, but the taste of a dilemma that could have arisen because of a debilitating drought that was wiping out acres and acres of cash crop and there was nothing to do but to sit by and take it in the gut.
The concerns and troubles that Ryan depicts on his latest album, Matthew Ryan Vs. The Silver State, are not those of the American farmer in their realest essence, but they are of the American man, who is forever tied to land and hard, back-breaking work days. Ryan sings about spitting that American dirt and though it's a declaration to not buying into the always forefront sales pitches and to embracing all of the real intimacy that does a soul good, there is a feeling that he's building a mystery, some song that tackles so much more than all of that. "American Dirt" feels like the thesis for the album as a whole piece of work and it's a song that you can return to again and again and hear the fight in his voice, the staggering, almost knocked out of the ring wobble to his admonitions and roughhewn lyrics. They feel like someone who has lived so much damn life, been awake for a record consecutive number of hours, using his hands and burning eyes to be productive for the bigger "man" and yet he's been actually awake for none of it because there's no pot of gold at the end of the week.
It's a working man's soundtrack. It's the bridge between the young men who are leaving college to seek out gainful employment or the farm boys heading back home to work the family farm, with a belly full of piss and vinegar and a desire to move mountains, and the men who have been scuffed up, bettered and bested through years of disappointments. They have a big TV, they fish when they can, they've got a family of their own and things aren't all bad. They can't complain much, but there is a void. Ryan sings, "I crossed my fingers until they broke," and these are the bits and pieces of the broken fingers and the broken hopes, the shattered scraps of the glossy dreamy life that seemed at the fingertips at 23 years of age.
