Sometimes 'compulsive' is the only word that fits. Sometimes you just can't stop.
It started for Ryan around age four when he discovered the family piano, an unadorned 1950s mahogany spinet that never ceased in its plea for attention. The boy, hearing the call, sat and played and played. After snack time, he played some more.
Working from old sheet music fished from the rickety piano bench, Ryan pieced together by ear what he thought must be the correct notes for the music he saw splayed across the staff, only to find out later that he had mistaken a G for Middle C. This tiny misunderstanding may have provided the impetus for Ryan's unique tonal sense, one that casts off traditional musical constructs -- Major Key for happy, Minor for sad -- in favor of an aural lexicon more in tune with life, where real happiness is often born of the interplay between Major and Minor, and sadness the same.
Ryan picked up instruments like tourists collect seashells along the coasts of his Floridian hometown. After piano came the alto saxophone, then the tenor. Guitar at age 12, soon followed by drums and bass. There were experiments with the obscure -- baritone for breakfast, banjo and bass clarinet for dessert -- and the eventual realization of humanity's second most basic instrument: its voice.
Fueling his musical obsessions through numerous band affiliations, Ryan took his first recording steps at the studio of local legend and musical |
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polymath Mark Dye at the age of 14. Developing quickly, the youth two years later convinced his parents of the merits of leaving school early to begin college so as to allow for more musical development time.
It quickly became apparent to Ryan, now 17, that something was missing from his music. Having taken to the habit of sequestering himself with his guitar at every opportunity, yet feeling the fruits of his labor straying farther and farther from the life he so desperately sought to musically encapsulate, the idea occurred to Ryan that perhaps rather than shunning the world in the hopes of finding musical clarity, he must embrace it instead. With open arms he did, setting off as a sort of western parivrajaka -- a wandering mystic -- to discover life as it is, so that through experience and understanding the teenager might one day create music with the power to alight with the breath of life itself.
What happened next?
It’s all in the music. The love, the loneliness, the friendship, the realization -- a multitude of experiences cloaked in sound, swaddled in harmony, released with delight -- it’s all in there.
Reemerging on the music scene in 2010, Ryan will release his first full-length album on July 18. Feeling the notes, hearing the silence, reading the words detailing a lifelong, undying obsession with life expressed musically, one recalls the longings of Allen Ginsberg, who wrote of his desire to become “a master at living.”
Sometimes ‘compulsive’ is the only word that fits.
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