Matthew Ryan
Concussion (Waxy Silver)
Playing Sept. 21 at
12th & Porter
Matthew Ryan believes fervently in the transformative, liberating power of rock ’n’ roll, which may be why he spends so much time feeling disillusioned and disappointed. He recalls the moment when he started to lose faith in U2, when he realized that “Bono had these characters all thought out. First he was the guy waving the flag, then he was The Fly.” Ryan finds Bono’s ’90s-era foray into postmodernism distasteful, and it makes him wonder if the band’s “committed” persona in the ’80s was also just a pose. Ryan frets over these issues, and he expresses his complicated feelings in lengthy, articulate discourse, which he punctuates with the phrase, “Y’know what I mean?”—a question he’s asking himself as much as his listener.
Above all, Ryan values sincerity and commitment. The idea that an artist can be thoroughly about one thing for awhile and then change horses is something he finds deeply offensive. “I’m really annoyed by people like Wilco or Old 97s, who deny their past and say, ‘We were never that.’ I never considered myself alt-country, but these guys did. It was part of their rise, but it only took them so far. I’m not judging their talent, understand. I suspect there’s a real endeavor there to grow. I think Jeff Tweedy’s brilliant. It’s just that people who were screaming about The Carter Family are now screaming about, I don’t know, Pet Sounds. Or The Kinks. It’s all part of a sales pitch.”
And yet Ryan’s about-to-be-released third album, Concussion, is remarkably different from the epic (almost U2-like) scope of his second album, East Autumn Grin, which was itself a departure from the moody roots-rock of his debut, Mayday. Concussion is the starkest thing Ryan has yet recorded—a muted, melancholy collection of songs in which desperate characters have their stories told by the straining rasp of Ryan’s voice and the soft, fluid undercurrent of a band that includes cello, harmonium, and pedal steel. The opening notes of the first track, “Drift,” are alone enough to make a listener sorrowful, and the record gets heavier and more intense as it plays on, culminating halfway through in a melting duet with Lucinda Williams on “Devastation.”
“I got really fascinated with folk music and the charms of country music,” Ryan says. “I had been talking about starting a folk-punk band and writing murder ballads.” Once he started in that direction, Ryan found the process to be a natural one, especially once he stopped worrying about the inevitable comparisons to one of his biggest influences, Bruce Springsteen. “I decided to write about characters that I’ve avoided in the past to keep from getting tagged with what I get tagged with again and again...the whole Springsteen thing. This time I just said, ‘fuck it.’ ” The “incorrectness” of playing to his stereotype ultimately thrilled Ryan. “It’s like, I heard about this movement in art where artists are deliberately painting sunsets,” he laughs, “because it’s what you’re not supposed to do.”
Ryan wrote and recorded Concussion long before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon, but the grim tone of the album almost foreshadows the tragedy. “There’s a really dark undercurrent that people are aware of and don’t want to admit,” he says, referring to a national mood and not specifically to recent events. “I’m trying to make some attempt at a cautionary tale, and to reference some kind of historical context, because it’s not going away.”
With that, Ryan tells a story about a friend of his mother’s who got into a flip-off contest with another woman while driving, and who was later forced off the road and beaten with a baseball bat. “It’s just an expression of powerlessness,” Ryan sighs. “But is this sort of thing happening with more or less frequency? Should it happen at all? Is there something more sinister going on? Something in the culture? There was a time in America when our oppression was physical. There was labor strife, immigration fears, Prohibition. Now oppression is more mental and emotional.... I don’t want to give the impression that this record is some kind of thesis on violence. It’s more about the smaller world, the interior world where all this happens.”
Ryan’s own world was upset recently when he had to extract himself from his contract with A&M Records, after the label was ceded to Interscope. “It wasn’t a lot of fun negotiating out,” he says, “but it was better than the alternative of staying. [Interscope] is a label with no identity, no taste. Just a big mass of confusion.” Nevertheless, the process caused Ryan to ponder his future. “I didn’t want to buy into the con of what a major label is,” he says, “but on some level I did. It became a part of who I am, and when it all fell apart I had to question if I still had a career.”
Concussion is instead coming out on Nashville singer-guitarist Will Kimbrough’s Waxy Silver label. And Ryan caught a break earlier this year, when filmmaker Ed Burns asked him to contribute a song to the soundtrack of the writer-director’s upcoming Ash Wednesday. “I have kind of a man-crush on Ed Burns,” Ryan chuckles, adding, “It seems every time I’m close to having to get a real job, I get some work.”
Some of that luck is of his own making. The list of great songwriters who hold Ryan’s work in high regard grows longer every day, and their esteem is borne out in Concussion numbers like “Autopilot” and “Night Watchman,” which roll along with gripping narratives and functionally memorable melodies. Ask Ryan about the songwriters that a “songwriter’s songwriter” admires, and he runs down an annotated list: There’s Mark Eitzel, who’s “like the child of Dean Martin and Billie Holiday”; Paul Westerberg, of whom he says, “I feel very protective of him”; Joe Henry, whom Ryan thinks is “doing what Tom Waits did in the early ’80s,” in terms of reimagining folk music in an industrial age; Waits himself; and Leonard Cohen, whom Ryan says “might just be an agent of God.”
Then there’s The Clash, who provide another highlight on Concussion in the form of their song “Somebody Got Murdered,” which Ryan covers to stirring effect. The Clash appeal to him, he says, because even though they kept restlessly experimenting, they never turned their back on their original mission or intent, and they maintained the courage of their convictions during their too-brief time in the spotlight. “I think they’re arguably the best band ever in rock ’n’ roll, by my code and my understanding of what rock must be. It seems so accidental.”
Ryan’s admiration for the band illustrates his own ideals, but it also raises a quandary for him. “One of the crimes I have is that I’m a perpetual second-guesser,” he confesses. “Not with the lyrics, but the music. I’m trying to learn not to let my consciousness get in the way of the expression. I want it to be so immediate to me, so unobstructed. Once you open yourself up to your history and your peers, you start wondering where you fit in. But even though you may feel that you’re not that great, that doesn’t mean that you aren’t.”
