Matthew Ryan – Autumn of discontent
The story Matthew Ryan wants to tell fits no handy plot because his songs, while they weave their narratives, distrust beginnings and won’t abide easy ends. “Maybe on some level it’s a defense,” he admits, “to bring you halfway through a story, or just tell you the ending. In the beginning you’re not getting the truth. At the end you are. But I suspect you already know the beginning. How to pick up girls, shit like that. Holding on to it, having it mean something, that’s the hard part.”
East Autumn Grin shows just how hard it is. In a caustic ripping at intimate ends, the rock music Ryan makes, however thrilling, is truthful enough to threaten those thrills.
“There’s a lot in this record about losing your sex,” he says, then quotes from his most honest and conflicted song: “In the subway of a slow dark pain/In the eyes of an old Polish woman on that train/In the echo of a muscle that fled/In the sheets of a big and haunted bed.” Between each line echo the refrains “I hear a symphony” and “You are not alone.”
“I was sitting in the subway, watching this old woman,” Ryan explains. “Maybe her husband was dead, was gone, but you better believe that some nights she still sits and thinks about the crazy-ass things they did in bed. It’s still there, but it’s gone.
“I can’t help but think of the things that aren’t present. When you’re in your twenties, most sexual experiences have been spent alone. [Laughter] The more intimate you get, the more you find yourself doing things. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about preoccupation, the excess of it today. People are bored. They keep thinking that the next invention, the next thing is going to change it. It has a lot more to do with contact, conversation, self-evaluation. This isn’t some mystical, Psychology 101 shit.”
Spring
Driving from the Opry Mills, where the calculations of commerce are complete, where small-town America comes to be confirmed in a world of familiar music and boundless choices should the credit card ceiling be high enough, the radio catches an Americana station playing many of the voices who have influenced Ryan. A catchy, upbeat acoustic number comes through the wires:
I’m gonna shake my soul
And release my hold
Givin’ up control
And let the rest unfold
Cause it’s a long, long way from here to where we go
Take off the training wheels
Lift off the handle bars
I’ll drive right through my fears
And resurrect my heart
It’s not Beth Neilsen Chapman’s best work, but it’s all too indicative of the first-person, spiritual recoveries, the help-your-self singer-songwriterisms of AAA radio, in which the language of soul, of resurrection and redemption, are tossed about like mixed greens.